I've got a funny UPS story unrelated to shipping bikes. A few years ago, UPS started to periodically leave boxes of dental supplies on my mom's doorstep. They had been shipped from various businesses. They never rang her doorbell. My mom was never a dentist, nor was anyone else in the family. The address label had an unknown dentist's name but my mom's address. I looked up the dentist online and found out that his office was very close to my home (a few miles from my mom). I called up the office, and the dentist stopped at my mom's home to pick up his supplies. I spoke with the dentist, and he told me that he had been having a problem lately with UPS. Whereas they used to deliver packages to his office during office hours, lately they had been attempting to deliver them after the office closed at 5pm.

Every few weeks, a new box of dental supplies was left at my mom's doorstep. Then I noticed the packages all had a 2nd address label placed over the original label, and that my mom's phone number was on the new label. I looked up the dentist's home phone number and discovered that his home phone differed by my mom's phone by just one digit.

What was happening was that after multiple attempts to deliver the boxes after the dentist's office was closed for the day, UPS printed up new labels with the dentist's backup address, which was intended to be his home address. But someone at UPS mistyped the dentist's home phone number into their database. They then repeatedly plugged in that incorrect phone number to print a backup address label when they were unable to deliver the packages, resulting in my mom's address being on the new labels.

I told the dentist I had figured out the problem. Then I called up the local UPS distribution center and supposedly spoke with a manager there and explained the problem and told them they had 2 problems they needed to fix:

1) For some reason, they had mistakenly decided, after 20 years according to the dentist, that the dental office was now a residential address and not a business address. They needed to change that.

2) They needed to correct the dentist's home phone number in their records so that my mom's address wouldn't get printed on the new address labels if they failed to deliver them to the dental office.

Weeks went by and the dental supplies continued to be left at my mom's home. If they were small (they usually were), I would take them and drop them off by bike at the dentist's office near where I live. If they were big, I called the dentist and he would pick them up at my mom's home.

The dentist (a nice guy; he was appreciative that I had become his surrogate UPS delivery person) & I were both getting fed up with UPS. I looked up the name of the CEO of UPS and figured out what his e-mail address was likely to be. I sent him an e-mail explaining the problem and also explaining in detail the 2 simple fixes they needed to make.

The next few days, I got multiple phone calls from various people at UPS. Someone high up in the regional office promised me they would fix the issue immediately. I made a request to her. I told her that I had been delivering UPS packages free-of-charge for several months. I asked her to send me a free pair of those cute UPS shorts. She asked me my waist size and said she would do that. Well, they fixed the delivery problem, but I never got the shorts. Maybe they should have sent them FedEx or USPS.