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Admin
Don't see anything wrong with the UPS one... Looks like it left a shipping facility, shift was about to end with it still on the truck, so the truck came back to the shipping facility...
Admin
The first one, from The Register, isn't really a problem. The first paragraph is simply a reminder of a regular series of articles, that are posted on Fridays. The later text explains that this article is a new offshoot from that series, and it isn't necessarily a Friday thing.
Admin
The package stayed on the truck for 3 days, twice? That's a long delivery round!
Admin
There are three comments held for moderation, yet somehow an obvious spam was posted by an unregistered user?
Admin
Even worse, one of the comments that was held was allegedly by the same poster who posted the spam.
Admin
What's more, it looks like that Register article was posted on Thursday 21st. They might have just decided to take the Friday before the Christmas weekend off.
Admin
The shipping one reminds me of a pair of servers we ordered once. The purchasing guy had a brain-fart and entered the office address (near Southampton UK), but his home post code (near Basingstoke UK) - about 30 miles apart. The servers arrived in Southampton depot, Southampton guys saw the Basingstoke postcode and sent them to the Basingstoke depot. The Basingstoke guys saw the Southampton address, and sent them back to the Southampton depot. Rinse and repeat several times, before we managed to get someone half sane to intercept them and send them to us.
Admin
I don't know what happened with the UPS one - it looks like their shipping partner lost the package and were covering up by pretending to be driving it around.
In many years as a manufacturing engineer in an electronics plant northern Michigan, I often depended on UPS or Fedex to bring the parts vitally needed to repair production equipment. UPS never disappointed me on the overnight shipments, short of weather so bad their jets could not land. The worst with UPS was one routine ground shipment from California that was 3 days late because it got mixed into a truckload of demos and other gear being shipped back from a trade show in Las Vegas, to I forget where. But that was no big problem - I just had to work with a smaller monitor screen for 3 more days than expected.
OTOH, one time I tracked a Fedex overnight shipment that we needed yesterday - one production line was down until it came in. The tracking showed it shipped from Texas after 5 PM, arrived at the Memphis airport, was on another airplane to TVC to arrive early in the morning - then went back to Memphis and waited a day before trying again. It finally arrived at 4 pm the next day. Fedex's sorting facility in Traverse City only handles ground shipments. The overnight packages rely on a Fedex truck meeting the airplane, and it must have been delayed by snow, so they just left the shipment on the airplane.
If I had been able to get the vendor for that part to ship UPS, it would been unloaded the first time, sorted in TVC and Gaylord, and arrived overnight. Maybe the snow would have slowed the truck from TVC, so instead of getting it in the 9 am delivery, it would have arrived around noon, but that would have been 28 hours faster than Fedex. That 28 hours was about $50,000 of production lost, and a huge fee for UPS overnight to get the shipment to the customer on-time.
Admin
It's been well known on the Forum here that deliveries tend to have their own special distortion fields that ensure that they operate in a time and space continuum not entirely coincident with the conventional one inhabited by most known humans.