Originally Posted by
3speed
Once when UPS tried to deliver a package and I wasn't home, they took it upon themselves to send it to an address that I hadn't live at for years, about an hour and a half away... Luckily the person who then lived there asked a neighbor, who recognized my mother's last name, and contacted my mother who lives in town. In a very round about way, No thanks to UPS, I was able to get my package a couple weeks later when I visited my mother. If it weren't for that random neighbor and some detective work, who knows what would have happened to my several hundred dollar Marzocchi fork...
I had something similar happen due to a combined screwup by Lufthansa, United Airlines, & FedEx. At the time, the home next-door to me was being rented. One day, FedEx left a suitcase by the front door of my neighbor when nobody was home. My neighbor thought I might be the person whose name was on the FedEx label. We had similar first names, but it wasn't me. Rather, it was someone who had rented the same home next-door to me a few years earlier. However that man was back home in Germany. However he was supposed to be coming back for a visit and had e-mailed me. I had invited him over to dinner during his upcoming visit.
Due to a screwup, they were denied boarding on their United flight to the USA after successfully flying on their Lufthansa intra-European flight. But United failed to get one of their suitcases off the transatlantic flight (a major security no-no). Then, the suitcase sat for 4 days at the US airport, when United decided to hand the suitcase over to FedEx for delivery. They failed to notice that the passenger had never boarded the flight, that a lost luggage report was outstanding, and that the passenger's permanent address was in Germany. FedEx looked up the passenger online and found his last US address. But it had been more than 2 years since he had actually lived in the US.
Fortunately, the passenger was now a friend of mine, and he had e-mailed me to tell me that their trip had been delayed for a bureaucratic screw-up. So I took possession of the suitcase and called my friend in Germany to let him know I had his suitcase. He was incredulous that their missing suitcase was sitting in my living room.