Shipping to the past
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When I bought some newly-released books at Amazon, I chose "Two day shipping". I did it because I wanted to get my books really fast, but not THIS fast!
Apparently, UPS managed to deliver my books 541 days into the past, 2241Km away from their intended destination. I hope this guy "Klance" from Michigan (who names their kids "Klance", anyways) is enjoying reading my books, which haven't been released yet on his own timeline. I should have sent him some lottery results instead...
These are the images from both Amazon and UPS for the same package, I haven't received any books, so I'll let you know what happens as events move on...
Is this a new meaning of UPS's "Quantum View (for Quantum Shipping)"? (look at the second image).
Mahoro
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The real WTF is UPS, happens all the time, they seem to reuse tracking numbers but don't remove old entries or something.
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The tracking number seems to have disappeared as well. Truly mysterious!
The Real WTF is the lack of validation allowing a delivery date before arrival and departure scans. But that's obvious.
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@XIU said:
they seem to reuse tracking numbers
UPS tracking numbers are a composite of the shipper's account number (if you have a UPS account) and some other gobbledegook. The real WTF is that their desktop shipping software can generate tracking numbers without ever talking to the UPS servers until you upload the day's information. There's no checking for tracking # collisions, except for looking at the software's local database of past shipments. Running the software on more than one PC, or having to wipe/reinstall it on the old pc, you're almost guaranteed to end up generating a duplicate at some point.
As for the "shipping to the past" business, I'm willing to bet the handheld scanner used at the destination had its battery die and didn't get synched after being recharged and heading out for the day.
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It's cool to see how Amazon sorts the tracking entries descending by date, while UPS does it excluding the shipping entry (probably stored in another table), sorts the rest of the entries and -then- appends the shipping entry. Most likely, the guys at Amazon don't trust in the API UPS might have provided them, and end up sorting what they get, just for the "what-if"...
I don't think there's (a huge) WTF in reusing tracking numbers, as they simply may run out of them. But if I had written the software, I'd wipe all the history of a tracking number before starting to use it, as it might have been previously used.
It does seem that they don't have a tracking of their own tracking numbers, and -that- is TRWTF.
By the way, the books haven't arrived yet...
Mahoro
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@mahoromhr said:
I don't think there's (a huge) WTF in reusing tracking numbers, as they simply may run out of them.
1Z + 16 AlphaNumeric
And if they exhaust their cache of 2.2300745198530623141535718272648e+43 numbers they can always move on to 2Z eh?
