Hilarious Criminals

Hi there.

So, I took some time off from writing anything into my site. Not really intentionally; I just didn’t have a lot to document that couldn’t be whatever ephemeral fluff in social media. So, it’s been nearly a year since the last What’s New.

Not that I’ve been up to zero things. The things I’ve been up to just haven’t been terribly fascinating within the moment. There’s a decent chance that they’ll be of some cumulative interest once they’ve actually led to something.

Which is to say that I’m working on some things. But those things aren’t really ready to talk about yet.

Meanwhile….

As I work toward completing things which might one day be more fascinating than whatever fluff I’ve emitted within social media, I’ve been known to take breaks from it to play with whatever sounds more interesting for a while. On warmish days, I’m probably out there on a OneWheel. Which, now that I think about it, might be news ephemeral enough to have been relegated to social media: I’m not sure I’ve ever really mentioned any of that here on the site. But it’s a simple enough story: I got on a skateboard in 1977 and I’ve stuck with that, inasmuch as the knee I destroyed in 1984 has hitherto let me; in 2012, I upgraded to a motorised skateboard which is more forgiving on my knee; then, in 2021, I sorta crossgraded to a OneWheel XR…a couple weeks before the OneWheel GT was announced…and therefore about a year before I also got a GT. So I’ve had that going on for eighteen months now.

Unless it’s cold and/or wet and/or bad for my knee outside. Then I’ve got toys in here, too.

Including the OneWheels, since they work nicely on carpet.

But I’ve got various things around here. Computers and videogames, for when I’m lazy; more kinetic coatracks like a Nautilus and whatever, for when I pretend for a moment that I’ve got any passing interest in exercise.

The trick with the Nautilus and whatever is that it can’t really be left Ready to Go. Partly because leaving it in an operational state would just stretch out the resistance rods; mostly because leaving it in an unfolded state would invite the cats to reduce it to the foam rubber filling the trash compactor in the Kenner DeathStar Playset with their claws.

Toys used to rely a lot more on one’s imagination.

I’ve got one of those around here somewhere, too; but I’m a grownup.

Sometimes, when I’ve got nothing better to do than go lament that the Nautilus only goes up to a hundred kilogrammes, one of the nothingbetter things I could do is to unfold it and set it all up to resist at two hundred and twenty pounds. Because, again: I’m a grownup; I’m six and a half feet tall and can probably lift slightly less than I’d try to lift just before hurting myself by lifting it, making it somewhat ideal to limit myself to two hundred and twenty pounds.

Other times, what I’ve got better to do is to actually lift something without subjecting myself to the bothersome chore of unfolding something and bending BowFlexy rod things into place until they all add up to a hundred kilogrammes. Like, probably. Hard to test for, since the Nautilus is what I’ve got to work with. But it might be good to have something I can walk into the room and pick up, and then set down because it’s become disinteresting again.

To that end, I got a neat idea about a month ago: I could probably just get some freeweights that, if I wanted to go lift something, would just be there waiting to be lifted. How hard could that be to arrange for….

This hard….

The Easy Part

I hit amazon.com, and looked for barbells. Which, it turned out, was a stupid term to search with. Most barbells, evidently, are dumbbells. I actually already have dumbbells; but they’re only fifteen or twenty kilogrammes each, so they’re kinda meh.

But, eventually, I tracked down what I’d call a barbell: a big rod thing, six feet long; and then heavyish discs you slide onto the bar to make it weigh more.

You put it together once, and then it weighs a bit.

So. That’s cool. A hundred and twenty-five bucks; free shipping; then it shows up here and we’re done.

I gave it to Hunter because I just tend to do that: as a disabled vet, she gets more thanksforyourservice discounts than I get, so she tends to order anything pricier than coffee at Starbucks.

Because the whole thing is now happening in her account, it’s out of my control. I can’t even confirm for certain when she ordered it—though I think it was on March the First, four weeks ago now. It was certainly that, or sometime late in February. As you’ll soon see….

And, because the whole thing is happening in her account, it’s out of my control if anything just happens to go a smidgey bit wrong over the rest of the damned month.

So let’s watch for that happening….

March the First

It’s March the First. Spring’s only three weeks away. Life is soon to be skittles and beer; pigeons will be poisoned in the park. And I have a tracking number for the barbell. Followed shortly by another. Because they’re in two different wrappers.

The one is four pounds and, I’ll learn one day, six feet long. So that’s the bar half of the barbell. It’s in the world:

Busy day for the bar of the barbell.

I could mention that, alongside that, there was a tracking number for a separate clump of stuff, weighing a hundred and four pounds, which looked exactly like that: label created; origin scan; departed from facility; arrived at facility. Not unlike if UPS weren’t hilarious criminals. So far.

March the Second

The next day, the app I use to track these things updated with new information:

Day Two: it’s all on the move.

Now the bar and the bells of the barbell are departing from Mattoon, Ilinois, for—as you’d expect—Hodgkins, Illinois…where everything ever mailed anywhere will end up for a minute or a hundred and twenty-three; and then it left Hodgkins, and that was the day.

March the Third

It’s a brand new day. And there’s an update to be updated about:

This is relevant to my interests: I too am in Aurora.

The awkward thing now is that March the Third is a Friday. Whether UPS would deliver this the next day, on Saturday, now that it’s in town, is anyone’s guess.

March the Fourth

I’ll save you a bit of the suspense:

And…we’re done.

So, that’s all over with. They’ve delivered the thing they contracted to deliver. A little. By sauntering up and leaving it out front, as evidenced [probably] by the Doorbell Camera.

Except….

The delivery was for the bar part of the barbell. The bells have updated with an alert that they’ll deliver them tomorrow. Probably.

March the Fifth

They didn’t deliver the bells on the Fifth. And there was no update about it.

March the Sixth

No updates. It’s just sitting there, somewhere down the street from me.

March the Seventh

Not a lot of news. It’s sitting down the street from me.

March the Eighth

Guess what: nothing; no updates; it’s down the damned street.

March the Ninth

It’s just sitting there, down the str—OH WHAT THE ENTIRE HELL….

Just…all of the entire hell.

Is that even possible? Like, physically?

For those who aren’t familiar with DenverMetro, this is what just reportedly happened:

Oh, now you’re fast….

Reportedly, in under an hour, a hundred and four pounds of stuff no one wants to bring me teleported from Aurora, where I am, to Commerce City, twenty miles north of me, and then to Englewood, fifteen miles from Commerce City and ten miles from me. Like, instead of remaining in Aurora, where I am, where the bar part of the barbell was, that got delivered a week ago because it was only four pounds and even the laziest of hilarious criminals can handle that. Note that, on the Fourth, when the bar part of the barbell was delivered, it and the bells were both Out for Delivery until they weren’t…for different reasons.

This is not a screen you should ever believe.

So, now, the bells have moved away from me. And they’re gonna stay there for a while.

March the Tenth

They’re just sitting there. Over in Englewood. Apart from just sitting there, the only information I can get from UPS is that they’re constantly begging me to drive over to Engelwood and pick the bells up myself. Because they’re lazy, hilarious criminals:

‘You don’t understand: we’re satirically terrible at our jobs!!!1’

Thusly:

Seriously: go tell on me, you hilarious criminals.

So. Now to go report it stolen….

Can’t. Because it’s not stolen until it remains stolen beyond the original delivery estimate.

Hunter sent me this to indicate that the hilarious criminals weren’t doing anything about it.

I’m not sure which chatmeatbot that was. There were two. One of which chatmeatbotted after the first one just ran away from the chatroom. So here’s a couple of these hilarious criminals for you….

Fiorella.

Estella.

…bobella; bananafannafofella; fifiefofella: hilariouscriminals…ella.

March the Sixteenth

Finally, the whole damned thing is officially stolen. That is to say that they investigated themselves, and found that they’d done something wrong. Uh…sorta.

‘Sorry we suck.’

The problem now is that there’s nothing to return, because it’s been stolen.

So, after a few more minutes of chatmeatbotting, of which I have no screenshots, they conceded that there was no known way to return a thing which got stolen before it was delivered. So, yeah: here’s you money; keep that; here’s also, like, an extra twenty bucks becuase damn we’re bad at this; this may be remembered as an admission of guilt.

So that’s that. That’s the entire thing. The bells of the barbell are somewhere in DenverMetro, stolen, and it’s not my problem anymore. The end.

March the Twenty-first

Why is this updating….

So, now, the bells from the barbell, which were stolen, which got us a refund, plus twenty bucks or whatever, just teleported back to Commerce City, and then back to Englewood, and then back to Commerce City again. All on the Twenty-first. For reasons bipeds will never grok.

Just…why….

I suppose it’s just not my problem anym—

March the Twenty-fifth

This has now become a hatecrime.

Why the hell is…what’s this got to do with…why am I even hearing about…fine: I’ll be here all day.

March the Twenty-sixth

So that was a lie. Again.

March the Twenty-seventh—Today

STOP IT!!!1

Look. I’m not part of this anymore. You sucked; it was in the past. Beleaguering me with additional—oh for the love of hell….

It’s bread!

Oh.

It’s a box.

So, UPS showed up. I’d call it unannounced, but they’ve kinda given themselves roughly a month to drop by whenever the hell they remember they’ve got a job to do.

So what happened was that, at 1.07PM, a lazy hilarious criminal blocked my driveway with a UPS Truck, rolled a hundred and four pounds of the bells from a barbell up through the snow, rolled it around the house to the front door, dumped it in the snow to get all soggy, ignored the doorbell recording him entirely, and wandered away without waiting for a signature or anything.

I went out and got this soggy loaf of misery, without a rolley thing, and brought it inside to get shots of as it pissed breadwater down onto the carpet.

And that’s all I’ve done, apart from marvelling at how much packing tape has been applied to this miserable heavy thing despite still allowing it to soak up molten snow in a matter of seconds until I could get outside to pick it soggily up. Now it’s just sitting there on the floor in the corridor, where I don’t really want it anymore, where I got the money back for it already, where I got an extra twenty bucks or whatever, where I don’t even know for sure what’s in it: Bells for a Barbell? Weapons Grade Plutonium? An Economic Plan Agreeable to All? Wouldn’t know: it stopped being my problem a while ago.

Except that it’s on my floor, slowly pissing bread, and being a thing someone might want me to pick up again and return to some hilarious criminal somewhere.

I’m not doing that.

Really, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to acknowledge that this soggy mess finally showed up here. I’m certainly not reboxing the damned thing; and I can’t imagine that UPS would pick it back up in the condition they molested it into.

I’m just gonna ignore it for a while. Say, at least for the next twenty-seven days. And then we can discuss what I charge for shipping.

I guess, at the least, I had a reason to lift a hundred pounds after all. The thrill’s kinda gone about that now.

March the Twenty-eighth

Minor update, of sorts:

Wrong post, Dummy.

You know what I know: I posted an image because I’m funny; something called UPS Customer Service replied to it. I don’t know why it replied to this post; I don’t know if it’s a scam account faking an actual UPS Account, or an actual UPS Account scamming because they’re hilarious criminals. But there it is.

Maybe it thought it was responding to something I’d posted on March the First.

April the Sixth

But, wait: there’s more….

Somehow.

So, Hunter just got an EMail from amazon.com, accusing her of knowing that she had to return the clump of stuff that finally showed up on the Twenty-seventh, and that they’d charge her if she didn’t.

Let’s take a second to catch up on all this….

Back on the Twenty-seventh, a UPS Loaf finally wheeled this battered mess of a cardboard box up to the front door and tumbled it into a puddle of melting snow—reducing the cardboard box to a cardboard sack. You saw the images, above.

I grabbed it without a wheely thing and carried it inside, because I’m too strong to work for UPS. And then I got the shots of it, above.

Then I ignored it for a while as it pissed snowwater into the carpet all night.

Eventually, I became curious enough to go ahead and open the thing.

Unshockingly, there were bits missing. Hang on: I’ll point that out on the image from the site….

Also, my handwriting is too educated for UPS: it’s unreadable.

Four of the little clippy things weren’t even in there. Nevermind that the two that were are relatively functionless, since the bars they need to slide onto are a little too banged up to let them fit correctly.

But that’s academic, because I don’t care. By the time this miserable mess showed up and proved incomplete, I didn’t even want the thing anymore. Like, at this point, if I want barbells, I’ll just drive a kilometre over to a sporting goods store, buy good ones, and throw them in the car. Even if that’s a level of effort I’d hoped to dodge by makebelieving that UPS could do some of that for me.

But then, to reiterate, Hunter got an EMail:

‘Or Else!!!1’

Okiedokie: I’m officially attentive now.

Here’s what I’m just about on the edge of willing to do for you idiots. I’ll stuff what I received of this multifraudulent clump of suck back into the cardboard sack I’ve retained; I’ll print out your label and set it somewhere on the cardboard sack’s surface; I’ll use whatever combination of packing tape and duct tape and thoughts and prayers to reseal the entire amorphous disease of a sack née box, and get it out the front door, and set it roughly where I found it…though there’s no puddle there anymore…I might be able to make a puddle…and keep it watered over the coming days of sunshine.

My point is that I’ll get it back out where I should never have touched it in the first place; I’ll leave it there until or unless you can manufacture a UPS Loaf capable of coming and getting it; I’ll bill you a thousand dollars an hour for storage until you do.

What I won’t do, under pain of death and/or another Disney StarWars FanFic, is to get the cardboard sack to my car, and into it, and two kilometres—twice the distance from me as the sporting goods store—to an Authorised UPS Loaf Factory to hand it off to whatever subhuman migratory sponge you imagine could ever drag it back to you.

That cool?

…is what I woulda said, if Hunter hadn’t just jumped into a chatroom to get this instead:

Feeling myopic yet?

That having been a PDF that she printed from the chatscreen a yoctosecond before it autoclosed, I can probably copypaste it for you:

So, there we are: back to not getting billed, and not getting a thousand bucks an hour to store anything for a Loaf Factory. For now. Until they try this again, and I report them to the Department of Hurting People as a terrorist organisation.

Have a webcomic:

If you’re worried about losing a couple crumbs, dunk it in your coffee first.

More later….

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