Here's what UPS did to my watch's shipping carton

I am about to detail the unfortunate experience of my watch and its shipping container at the hands of an irate (or careless?) UPS employee. If you are averse to violent or graphic images, please do not read any further. If, on the other hand, you are used to such images, and are even sadistic enough to want to see them on a regular basis, this is a unique opportunity to do so on my blog. I do not plan to update this post with further images, so enjoy them while you are able.

This unfortunate story begins with my extremely generous in-laws, who were kind enough to buy me a watch for my graduation. I'm thrilled, because I've wanted an eco-drive watch ever so long, but never had any means of acquiring one. Now I have both the means and a (somewhat) valid excuse! I searched the entire internet for the best watch for my needs, and, having found said watch on amazon.com (props to Amazon for their broad selection - I'll accept any endorsement fee through my paypal account), ordered it on Sunday. Even with the Memorial Day festivities looming, Amazon expected the package to arrive on the 1st, i.e. Wednesday, via that ubiquitous shipping company UPS. This is where things started to turn sour. Alicia and I had to go out for some groceries in the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday, and on the drive back to our apartment I spotted our local UPS delivery truck. Naturally, I was somewhat excited at the prospect of having my new watch on my wrist by the early evening! I waited patiently in our apartment for the next hour or so, my anticipation growing with the passing of each minute (I had to use my cell phone to tell the time, btw). By 5:30pm I was becoming anxious, so I, in my excitement, waddled out to the front door of the building to see if the UPS truck was perhaps sitting in the parking lot as the driver finished with some less important deliveries. It was not. In fact, to my bitter surprise, there was an InfoNotice on the door of my building, informing me that the driver had been unable to deliver the package. Apparently, I wasn't home after all.

This has happened to me before, but this time I was especially annoyed at having missed a package by sitting on my couch instead of waiting on the bench outside my building. I called UPS to find out whether there would be any possibility of picking up the package at their customer service location downtown before Alicia headed off to work, and I was told that the local office would contact me to confirm a pickup time. By 6:30pm, I knew that the jig was up, there was no way they would call me on Wednesday. At 7:50pm, the infonotice data online indicated, in three separate entries, that the customer (that's me) would pick up the package that day (1.3 hours after their 6:30pm closing time?). This was starting to sound ominous, as I would only expect the system to need one line to tell me that, and in the past the branch has always called me to tell me whether the driver would be back in time for me to make the pickup before closing time. I wasn't too nervous, though. I figured I could get the watch on Thursday morning without too much hassle (it's only a 10 minute drive downtown to the office).

Thursday morning arrived, and when my cell phone showed 9am, I headed down to the office. Upon my arrival, I handed over the infonotice and the representative headed back into the warehouse to find the package. It took her and her assistant about 5 minutes to track down the box, it was apparently on the wrong shelf. When it appeared, it looked like this (look away, if you get queasy):

I stood there for a couple minutes weighing the options available to me: I could refuse delivery, citing the obvious signs of abuse, and then reorder through the good people at Amazon, who would doubtless make no trouble for me (they never have before, but then, I've never refused delivery before, either). Alternatively, I could take the thing home and see if the watch itself, or its immediate packaging, had been harmed in transit. Amazon is pretty good about these things, so my photographic documentation of what UPS had done to the box would probably be enough to set up an exchange without too much trouble, should the need arise. I decided to take it home and see how the watch itself was doing before trying to figure out if I should exchange the watch or not.

Unfortunately, the condition of the box didn't magically improve on the drive home, but I did get better shots of its sad, misshapen form outside the UPS shop and again in my living room (again, avert your eyes if you've a weak stomach):

The inside of the box wasn't too bad, and the watch itself was packed well enough in its own small box that there was no obvious evidence of damage. I've managed to set the watch and get it running, so I'll track its accuracy over the next several days to see how that is. If there are any issues, I've got both an Amazon and a Citizen warranty against defects and problems, and I'll let them hash things out with UPS if any conflicts eventually do arise. For now, I'm quite happy with the way the watch looks and feels, it's surely going to improve my quality of life dramatically, and I also expect it to contribute in a positive way to the image that my hair has already helped me to craft. After all, I am my hair, innit?

Another Newsy Update

Since we haven't posted since April the 23rd, and since today is Saturday, and since some things have actually happened over the past few months, and since I have done enough work for one day, I have decided to blog a bit. It should be observed, as always, that the things that I choose to blog are not necessarily the same as the things my faithful readers will consider worthy of note. That said, I begin:

Alicia graduated in June, and as you all will remember, I secured an outside funding source to maintain our extremely modest lifestyle in Spain for 9-10 months, beginning in September. Last time I wrote, we were still figuring out how Alicia could justify accompanying me to Spain, given that finding work for her would be extremely difficult, and securing a visa so that she could conduct such work nearly impossible, in the small amount of remaining time. Since then, Alicia has been admitted into Master's program in Nursing, and thus will be able to work toward that degree even while living off in the virtual "boonies" of Spain. By the time we return to the U.S., she will have completed some 3/5 of her degree, and we are both projecting completion dates of our respective degrees for the year 2009 (read "twenty-aught-nine," or simply "aught nine").

For my part, I have spent a good deal of time tracking down the books and articles that will be most difficult to find in Spain, furiously taking notes that I hope will be relevant to the larger project, or in some rare instances buying the books so that they can accompany us to distant lands (via surface mail, no doubt).

The past few postings I have made focused largely on my mom's recovery from oral cancer, and I believe another short update may be appropriate in that vein. From what I understand, her recovery continues to go well, though she does experience quite a bit of stiffness (or did a few weeks ago) in her neck and shoulder due to the surgical interventions in those areas. Her speech has rapidly improved since the second operation, though I suppose that she will continue to struggle with certain sounds, particularly in Portuguese, for some time. Those wondering how she feels about the recovery in general will draw some conclusions from the fact that my parents have been in Angola for the past 10 days, the very initial stages of a four-month visit to their home-away-from-home away-from-home. In other words, whether or not my mom is recovering as she should be, it is back to work as usual for both of them. I must admit that this is not exactly how I envisioned the months after her relatively major operations, but in some ways it's not really my business.

We are looking forward to having my parents visit us in Spain once they have returned from Angola, and after we have settled into whatever apartment we are able to find between now and then. It is perhaps somewhat ironic that the 10-month period of our stay in Spain will only overlap my parents' time in Portugal by 3 or 4 months, as they also have a trip to the U.S. planned during that time.

Some might argue that this is a relatively short post, but I have run out of clever things to write.

Until we write again,