No, thank YOU for getting touch

I’m not sure if this is a good news story or a bad news story. It is a story, and it was an adventure. Not for me, but for a parcel sent to me from Arkansas USA on May 5th.

I received it Oct 27th. Hey, I get it. Plagues. Lockdowns. Political interference in the system. Supply chains. Most days, I’m not a moron and I’m not an insensitive monster. I figured it would take a while. It wasn’t mission-critical. Honestly, I’m amazed anything ever arrives anywhere ever. It’s a big planet and parcels are relatively small and reliant on a whole bunch of people not losing, destroying, damaging, misdirecting, ignoring it etc. I have no doubt there are stats showing a 99 point something percent success rate.

The adventure began thanks to online tracking. I checked in after a couple of months and followed the history of erratic and, to me, unpredictable lurches around the continental US. I think Pixar could make a movie about the travels of my parcel, anthromorphed ‘Cars’-style. I’m not saying Tom Hanks should play my parcel but I’d be OK if they gave someone else a chance, like Paul F Tompkins. I guess in a prologue, the parents of my parcel would have died tragically? Ooh, I know that post offices do have a ‘dead letters’ department. That is soooo Pixar.

Then, suddenly, (Movie Act 2 turning point) it lurched from Chicago to Dallas then TOKYO. After almost 4 months touring route 66’s offshoots, it spent a single night in Tokyo before appearing in Auckland at the end of August.

I’m not going to lie to you. I was disproportionately excited. Auckland was entering lockdown week 3 level 4, so I tried to temper my enthusiasm. I figured it might get stuck in customs for a while.

It didn’t move or get re-scanned for a month. Then, it spent a month in maybe one or maybe various “regional mail centres” being scanned many times. Mid-Oct “out for delivery”. Next day “redirected due to misdirection”. (Note to Pixar director: get Hans Zimmer to do one of those Christopher Nolan-style deep chords here).

At this point, I use NZ Post’s online form to ask what’s going on. I’m being chill. I get that they’re busy in turbulent times. I get an auto-response of “we’ll get back to you in 2 working days”. I did that twice in 2 weeks. Never heard back. There were banners advising 5 day delays in Auckland due to COVID and lockdown. Trying a 3rd time, I found that they’d disabled the contact form entirely.

Again, chill-as, I DM’d them via their Twitter and FaceBook. I got a human response within the hour and within 3 the status changed to “with courier”. Later that afternoon, the parcel arrived.

Stories require a moral – a learning takeaway. I’m not yet sure what this story’s SHOULD be but my behaviour change as a customer moving forward is to bypass whatever customer system businesses have and backdoor it as soon as I can.

Oh, my parcel’s name is Shannon.