A Friendly Letter to UPS.

Dear UPS,

Hi. Let me start off by saying that I am a frequent patron (the customer type, not the tequila, which is delicious but not applicable here unless you count drinking out of frustration. Actually, I do that, so maybe this is all related for a reason...) of your services and seldom have customer service problems. Well, that was true until this week when you allegedly "lost" one of my "parcels" and were rather unhelpful on the phone when I called to track it down, leading me to believe that UPS drivers plan their truck routes skirting the precipices of black holes, and occasionally the odd package will leap from the truck and be sucked in and lost forever in a region of deformed spacetime.

It is fortunate for you, then, that my parcel did not contain anything like a kidney, which, though sort of replaceable, is quite hard to come by and rather expensive on the black market. (Or so I hear, ha ha!) And rest assured, I was not shipping any sort of drugs that I would now owe the outrageous sum total of to some unscrupulous mob or mafia or drug dealer who would surely want to break several of my bones probably starting with my thumbs, because opposable thumbs are just so damn useful, aren't they? I'm actually using them this very moment to type all of the spaces between these words!

So, while my package might not have been time sensitive and important enough that the fate of the free world rested upon the sole responsibility of you to deliver said package to the provided address per your end of the transaction, I must now explain the disappearance of this package to some particularly cranky clients, to whom "I don't have any additional information," is not an acceptable response. I have taken it upon myself to offer you a little nudge in this direction and have provided you with some acceptable explanations that I might offer to these clients, if you should so agree. Feel free to pick as many as you like!

- "We lost your package because the driver who picked it up does not actually work for us. In fact, he's not even alive. He is a ghost who absconded your items and has carried them to Purgatory - the same place that your unmatched socks disappear to from within your dryer. You should have paid more attention to his uniform patch because it reads GhostPS, not UPS, and we're not affiliated with them."

- "We lost your package because we lost the whole truck and driver. Authorities have been called out to examine if there is some sort of Bermuda Triangle phenomenon going on in the Los Angeles area. We suspect the truck is now in a parallel universe, along with Courteous Driving and Culture, which have also been missing from Los Angeles for some time."

- "We lost your package because our driver encountered a shitstorm of raptors on his way to your destination. We believe the raptors took your parcel, as well."

- "UPS actually stands for Unemployed Pregnant Strippers - a temp agency aimed at finding ex-stripping, soon-to-be mothers gainful employment. We have nothing to do with the United Parcel Service."

- "We lost your package because we were playing hide and seek with it but had to go inside when Mom called us for dinner and then forgot where it was hiding."

You see that any of these explanations would be acceptable, so long as your customer service representative does not keep repeating to me that she does not know what happened and that she cannot help me. If you can't assist me further in this matter, I'm afraid I'll have to take my business to DHL, because someone told me that their acronym stands for Damn Helpful Lads and is a far cry from your Unhelpful Package Stealing nonsense. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.