There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Mr. Burns wants to send an express package to someone. It rapidly goes through several handlers (in a parody of a FedEx or DHL advert – I forget which) before being given to Homer to deliver. Homer sees Mr. Burns’s name on it, and not realizing that this is the ‘From’ person, rushes, panting into Mr. Burns’ office to deliver it to him, some 30 seconds after Mr. Burns sent it in the first place. Classic stuff. But sadly all too real…
I’ve just relocated my office from Brussels (Belgium) to Houston, Texas.  I packed up my 13 years’ worth of assorted crap into four large boxes and asked my Admin Assistant to ship them on to me at some stage, “no rush”. There were a handful of documents that I needed more urgently and didn’t want to blow my luggage allowance (or back) on, so I asked her to send them express, via courier. When I subsequently arrived in Houston (after a week’s diversion to Fairfax, VA, to teach a course), my boxes had miraculously arrived, but the express package was nowhere to be seen.
After a bit of tracking down, I found out what had hapened to it. It had been sent from Brussels without issue, but when it got to the company mailroom in Houston, mailboy Billy-Bob Dipshit Jr. decided against actually delivering it to the exact office specified on the envelope, but instead checked for my office location in the company directory. As I hadn’t gotten around to updating this yet (as I was ‘in transit’) this still referred to my office in Brussels. So what did he do? That’s right – mailed it straight back to my old office in Brussels. Even though this was clearly already the ‘From’ address…
So I had to have my Admin Assistant on Brussels go round and pick it up from my old desk (where the Brussels mailroom had efficiently put it) and send it straight back again. This time I’ve updated my address in the directory, just in case Billy-Bob has another one of his brainwaves. Special delivery? Yeah, like special needs special…
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