Courier Driver Forgot He Was Fired

I heard a good one from my boss this morning. We use companies who contract independent couriers to pick things up for our customers and bring them to our facilities. not all customers have something to be picked up every day, so those people call in just when they need it. the route for the day is uploaded to an app on the driver’s phone to let them know the order and location of all customer pickups before they head to our facility. here’s what happened:

due to multiple issues we demanded a courier be removed from service. he was, and his last route was saturday. monday evening, he apparently forgets he was fired and goes on his route. only he no longer has the app to know the order of stops. or the keys to the drop boxes for the packages to be picked up. regardless, routes rarely change, and he goes to the typically 4th stop on the list. not the 1st, the 4th. this stop is a call in. they did not call in that day. but he does go in and they do in fact have a package to be picked up regardless of the lack of call in. he takes it, and leaves.

he remembers as he’s leaving that he was fired several days ago. instead of going back in and explaining it to the customer, he takes the package, and brings it to ‘business name’ 42 miles away. 42 miles. and leaves it in a drop box at this random location which is nearby our facility, but not on the route sheet and hasn’t been for a very long time.

important to note: the contents of this package were worth almost $1000 and while replaceable, not easy to re-obtained and belong to the business owner of the customer who sent the package.

so the driver gets caught when the tracking doesn’t show up in the system. he’s asked about it, owns up to everything, but insists that he dropped the package off in a box at ‘business name’ only 5 miles away. there isn’t a ‘business name’ at that location, it’s a completely different business. the only one we know of is 42 miles away and we’re sure it’s the only one in the area.

so we do some digging. turns out the courier was right. he dropped it at a location 5 miles away that used to share a name with the 42 mile away but had changed it at some point. 2 things about this 5 mile location: they closed the business permanently the day before this all happened, but had yet to remove the drop box from their property. the driver was aware of this. he was told when he went to that location the week before. he was actually at the wrong location that time, but was told by the employees there not to come back ever anyway because they were closing their doors permanently.

so fast forward about a week and he decides to take this package to a business he knows is permanently closed and slip it into a drop box that is still there, but not tell anyone. we send someone to recover the package the next morning. the drop box is gone. of course.

to summarize: a driver was fired, forgot he was fired, goes on his route, remembers he was fired, and instead of owning up to his mistake takes a very expensive item to a business location he knows is closed for good and slips it into their drop box instead, doesn’t tell anyone, and goes home. package gets tossed with the drop box by the closed business when they return to clean up and is lost for good.

ready for the punchline? this 5 mile away business that closed for good…doesn’t even use our services. they use a competitor, and had for years before closing. -__-

this is almost better than the bear story one of our guys told me about six months ago…