UPS Doesn’t Share My Sense of Humor

Like everybody else, I’m trying to send presents to relatives. My brother and his family live in Washington, so I need to get running to the UPS store to make sure my presents arrive before Christmas (the gift cards to their kids, Andrea already mailed out).

I have my two little presents that I carefully wrapped in Santa Claus wrapping paper and put little name stickers on for them. When it’s my turn, I hand over the presents, the guy behind the counter puts them in a box that he’s taped up. He then asks me what’s in them. Not in a casual “so, what are you sending your brother” way, but in an official capacity. I’ve just heard somebody else being ordered to present their contents. This doesn’t jive with me.

“Does it matter what I say? They’re presents.”

“Right. But what kind of presents. We have to include this information now.”

Fine. The writer in me spins through a couple of ideas. One pound of uncut cocaine, a la Jenny Lawson? Copycat, you can do better. Explosives? Bazooka? That might get him in trouble with Homeland or ATF or somebody. My mind spins. What is something that is probably legal but also embarrassing to receive? You probably know exactly where I’m going with this.

“Well, it’s for my brother, so put down ‘sex toys.'”

The people on my side of the counter think I’m genius. And to his credit, the guy putting together my box of Texas memorabilia sex toys, he’s laughing, too. He starts entering the information.

Unfortunately, the other women behind the counter did not share our sense of humor. They get really mad. Angry eyes, which is important in the pandemic when everybody’s wearing a mask. “Sir, U.S. Customs goes through every one of these boxes, and if they are not an EXACT MATCH, you can get into trouble. At the very least, your items will be returned.”

I can see I have royally ticked this employee off, and I know the workers at UPS are under a lot of stress, so I don’t want to upset her any more. I say, “Okay, it’s really BLANK and BLANK.” (BLANK cause I don’t want to ruin my brother’s presents.)

The kicker is, after the order is put into the system, he can’t ring it up, and the woman who was not impressed with my humor, she tells him my package can’t be done on her register because it doesn’t do international.

Last time I checked, Washington was still in the union.

The guy helping me explains it isn’t international, and she says “Oh, that’s why I brought up Customs. For domestic, the item list is only needed for insurance purposes.” But she also has that same smug look on her face, like she was really happy that she was wrong about that because she did not want pretend sex toys being mailed from her office.

You may be thinking I’ve lost and she got her way, and you’d be right. But I’m a writer, and I will get my revenge my own way. Since I only need this for insurance purposes, I’m going to get real creative in my distribution. Sex toys and headless corpses seem to barely breach my capability.

Hey, thank you for reading and I hope you are enjoying my posts. I’m a writer from Texas who dreams of one day writing full-time. I write the Zombie Dog books, which you can find here both digitally and paperback. I also have a Patreon account here.

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