Indistinguishable
Today, due to a frankly ridiculous series of catastrophes, I have two different couriers picking up two different boxes for two different destinations.
The boxes look identical to one another, and contain almost identical cargo.
What odds can I get that they will take the wrong ones?
5 responses to “Indistinguishable”
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The Angry Technician 
A better trick will be to see if you can get them delivered back to you.
I had to return a dead server drive to HP under warranty last year – it was boxed up, the shipping label was clearly and securely attached to the box, and I left it in the main office with a post-it note on it explaining the courier would collect it.
The courier collected it…
…and returned it to me two days later, complete with the post-it still attached to the box!
This wouldn’t happen to be HP warranty-cover replacement returns, would it?
I had a similar fiasco a while back where an HP server was exhibiting some “issues”, and over the course of several days(!) of attempted hardware swaps, I ended up with 3 boxes of parts to return – all to different addresses.
Suggestions such as 1 courier coming to pick up all 3 boxes were met with derision, so I was forced to make 3 individual phone calls to arrange the collection of each box.
To compound matters, each of the 3 couriers arriving onsite (2 on the same day within an hour of each other) had no idea what they were actually coming to collect – making the 1001 questions asked such as weight, content, barcodes etc when logging each individual pickup all a little pointless, it would seem.
Either the law of averages were in my favour or the couriers just left it with HP to sort out, but I didn’t receive any “where are our parts?!?!” follow-up calls..
I had a courier turn up for a broken HDD (with practically no warning) and refuse to take it not in a box. Time for the biggest box possible… and no packing materials, too.
Been there, done that, sent a £250 APC management card back to Dell (rather than Insight) instead of a Hard Disk for warranty replacement!
Told the support rep I was dealing with about the cock-up, he unfortunately didn’t come back to me about it so we were a considerable sum of money out of pocket.
I’m saddened that there’s not a single “Get Me Hennimore!” reference from “That Mitchell and Webb Look”. Even worse, it had to be an American (me) pointing it out. :)