The parcel that I mentioned did arrive at eight in the evening on the sixth, even though it was already late by that point. However, I chalk this up to the fact that I persistently asked FedEx about the status of it since one item that I attempted to buy in December of 2021 was already stolen from that drop-off point — I wasn’t about to let another parcel get stolen by them if I could help it, even if this parcel was… somewhat larger… in the form of a desk. In the interim I began reading about FedEx, though, and that search led me to their Reddit where apparently a lot of people have complained that their PlayStation 5s have been stolen, ranging from the driver not delivering them (or faking delivery) to them being taken out of the boxes before they were even delivered because Sony puts what they are on the box, instead replacing the contents of the box with similarly heavy things. (And apparently this still happens for people recently buying PlayStation 5s, too…)

When I was a teenager, someone got Final Fantasy X-2 for me a a Christmas present. Upon opening it, I realized that there were AOL discs (yes, this was back in the day when America Online was still a viable Internet option) rather than the game discs that I had been expecting. The person took the game back to get an actual copy of the game, and the place that they’d bought it from almost didn’t believe that this had actually happened until someone came in right behind them complaining that their electronics had been replaced with America Online discs as well. I eventually got my hands on the game that I was supposed to get that Christmas even though I didn’t actually get around to finishing it for… well, quite awhile, but the fact of the matter still stands that this absolutely does happen. FedEx seems like it is the worst in the whole United States for this, though. You can practically doomscroll on Reddit reading about items that FedEx has stolen, and in some of these cases drivers have actually been fired or had charges pressed against them because FedEx could prove that the item had actually been loaded onto their van when the decision was made by them to steal it. Those are the stories that I like reading about since someone is held responsible.

For those of you who weren’t around in December of 2021, a video game that I had attempted to buy my son from WalMart that was sent through FedEx with a guaranteed delivery date was stolen before it could even be loaded onto the truck that was supposed to transport it to my home. Fraudulent tracking notations were actually put on the tracking indicating that it had been put on the truck when it had not, and after I made my first inquiry to FedEx, more fraudulent notations were put on the parcel’s tracking alleging that it had actually been dropped off at my house when no such delivery had ever been made. FedEx gave me the go-around about it for several days, initially not even being able to commit to whether or not it had been loaded onto the Hewitt truck, then making me wait several more days for them to “search” for it when they knew that this was a time-sensitive item with alleged guaranteed delivery, eventually following up with me telling me that they could not find it, that they had never been able to find it, that I should contact the seller about a refund… basically coming out as far as they could say to tell me that it was stolen. I expected that.

This appears to be happening again with a computer desk that I’ve bought my kids. It got to the same drop-off point, has mysteriously been delayed, and I’m getting the same run-around about where this package even is that I got in December of 2021. If it doesn’t arrive by the end of today, which is when it’s newly supposed to be “slated to”, I will be contacting FedEx again and having them go through the same song and dance that they went through in December of 2021 to try to find this… very likely-to-be stolen package.

So the person that was supposed to come out to our house to fix our dryer… literally never came out.

We called them to ask about it, and they claimed that we tried to make a “next-day appointment”, so they had to cancel it. We literally called them about our malfunctioning dryer on Friday and they gave us a Tuesday appointment, so this was not next-day. They offered us an appointment a week from the date we called to ask them about the missed appointment, but we declined (they were already showing how unprofessional they were), and instead we got a second dryer to replace the one that had died awhile back due to old age — that one was almost as old as my youngest son. We wound up being able to take parts out of the dryer that had irreversibly died of old age, and those parts powered the dryer that we tried to have get repaired by a third-party. So that saved us $300, quite possibly more than that depending on what the person that was supposed to come out looking at our dryer would have said after he’d examined it.

We also have two functional dryers now, go us! That’s the setup that we were running before all of… this.