There are lots of elves that work through the winter holidays. After Santa went bust with his pets.com investment during the dot-com boom/bust many if his elves went to work for Amazon and UPS; after all, that’s where all the toys come from now.
A few though were bitter about their losses. With their pensions invested in a failed sock puppet, and Santa delving into horror since he can’t afford to run a toy factory anymore, some have turned to crime. These bitter elves have taken jobs at UPS; not so they can delivery toys, but rather so they can steal them.
Today I came home to find two boxes waiting for me on the porch. UPS had left them while I was at work, no signature required, so I was not able to inspect them prior to accepting them. The smaller of the two boxes looked odd, like it had not been properly folded closed at shipping. The merchant sticker was intact across the seam though, so I was blissfully ignorant until I got the box open.
Eagerly I did open it, as this was the RMA memory from Other World Computing (aka macsales.com) which would finaly put my G5 saga to a temporary rest. In an earlier post I mentioned that I had 4G of memory to install in my new box. Well, it turned out that one of the modules, if not the whole pair, was defective and caused random machine crashes. OWC was very responsive when I called for an RMA, and they cross-shipped my replacement memory. Except, well, the box was empty. OK, not entirely empty; the rat bastard evil elf who stole my memory left me the RMA paperwork. Fat lot of good that does me.
I called Other World computing, and spoke to Mike in customer service. He said that he would file a lost/stolen item claim with UPS, and that I would hear from them within the half hour. UPS never called. I’m guessing they have a lot of evil elves, and I’m probably down the list of call-backs by a fair number.
I figure the theft had to have happened at OWC or at UPS, and if it happened at OWC mine was a pretty small order to take such a risk. I can’t imagine why a thief on my doorstep would have taken the time to pry open the box and then put it mostly back together. It would have been easier to just pick up the paperback sized box and walk away. That leaves UPS. I wonder if the theft has anything to do with my package not being trackable in the UPS system for several days of its journey?
This holiday the wrong elves were working at UPS. The bastards!