It's A Conspiracy

All We Lack Are Black Helicopters

I do realize, of course, that there are people in the world with worse problems than I. Where some people are dealing with the aftermath of hurricanes, tsunamis, grinding poverty, virulent disease, or living in a Blue State under socialist dictatorship Democrat rule, I merely have to contend with a minor respiratory infection and the pedantic fumblings of the incompetent proletariat. Still, it's my weblog, and I'll whine if I want to. (You would whine too, if it happened to you! Doo wop, doo wop!)

I drag my sickly carcass out of bed Saturday for the sole purpose of getting the iMac to the FedEx office before noon, so I could catch the early pickup and have my replacement winging its way to me no later than this afternoon. The folks at Apple swear on a stack of old IIvx motherboards that as soon as FedEx takes possession of the iMac I'm returning, they'll release the replacement so I can get back to computing ASAP. All this requires on the part of FedEx is a swipe of the barcode reader, and I'm free of any responsibility. What could possibly go wrong??

Turns out the FedEx/Kinko's is a 24 hour store, so I should be even better off, right? Nope. No pickups until 6 pm that night. I ask for a receipt so there's some record that I've no longer got this Mac in my care, but am told to not worry, it'll be tracked in the system!

As of last night at midnight, it wasn't in the system. Hmmm... No tickee, no washee, as they say.

Called the FedEx/Kinko's shop this morning about 10-ish to see where the breakdown was. Took 15 minutes on hold, then another 10 minutes for the genius in charge to locate my box, still there behind the counter. They had no record of it being entered in the system. Of course, they're most apologetic, swear they'll scan it in immediately, and it'll be on the 6 pm freight wagon heading west.

It's now almost 3 pm, still no record in the system, and I'm getting pretty steamed. I have zero means of proving that I actually turned this over for shipping. What stops some FedEx dude from seeing that it's a computer, deciding to just hide it on the back dock for a few weeks, then debone it and part it out for drug money?

Sigh. Back in the day, I could've just swept into their village in the dead of night with a horde of fellow consumers, had the malefactors put to the knout before herding off the women and raping the livestock (Uhhh, lemme rethink the order there...), then burning their damn huts down.

UPDATE: Package is finally in the FedEx tracking system, 52 hours after initial dropoff. Incompetent mule molesters, all of 'em!