The FedEx Saga

Like so many disasters, the Great Fedex aga of Summer 2004 began with a simple plan: Ashley has an eagle eye for copy-editing errors, so she'd give the Planet Simpson manuscript page proofs a final read-through before we sent it off to Toronto and hit the Trans-Canada for our two-month summer holiday.

Now, for the uninitiated, page proofs are printouts of a book's pages as they will look when published. They are the last thing an author sees before his or her book goes to press. This is the very last chance to notice misspellings, syntax errors or poor word choices. It's also the last chance for your quickwitted wife to notice, for example, that one of your footnote-sidebar-things is factually incorrect and therefore invalid, [link to come, but for now suffice to say that it involves a preferred nomenclature debate: "Inuit" vs. "Eskimo"… stay tuned] which is indeed one of the things Ash caught as she read through the manuscript those days in late June.

The original plan was to send them off before we started on our cross-Canada extravaganza to Nova Scotia for my triennial family reunion. My patient editors at Random House Canada were to imput my final changes and send the last draft of the manuscript to the printer by Monday afternoon, at the very latest. Big-time book printers, I'd only recently learned, have printing schedules so tight that even a 24-hour delay can mean a book is bumped from the print queue and can't make it to stores on time as a result. We were cutting it close, and it was a tense situation, to be sure. but our plan had the proofs getting to Toronto on time, if just barely.

Alas, we hit a glitch: it was taking Ash longer than initially anticipated to do her final read-through. I argued for just sending off what we had. In large part this was because by this point I was so sick of my own musings on The Simpsons that I swear entire pages were rearranging themselves into "blah blah blah blah blah blah blah" before my very eyes. Ash held her ground, though, arguing that if you were going to do something right, you had to do it right and see it through to the end and so on. And so I bowed to the wife's good judgement (at least she wasn't sick of my blithering blather) and I took the first half of the manuscript down to FedEx in Calgary. We gave it another day to let her plough through the rest. And good thing too, because she did keep catching stuff like the aforementioned erroneous footnote-sidebar thingee.

On into the night Ash hunted for duplicate phrasings and unnecessary commas, armed with several bottles of club soda and a bag of cheez-its.

And on into the next day, sitting in the passenger seat of our Civic as we zoomed east across Alberta and Saskatchewan, she sat there hunched over the work, with page proofs spread out on the dashboard and a stack of little Post-Its to attach where she saw possible corrections. I'd drive while she edited for a while, and then we'd switch spots, and I'd go through and systematically accept or reject her suggestions.

On we went across the empty prairie, past the weirdly-monickered-but-nonetheless-venerable prairie cities of Medicine Hat and Swift Current and Moose Jaw, on still past Regina… Finally we'd both had it and we pulled off at some tiny little motel in the middle of nowhere near the Manitoba border that was run, surprisingly, by a stalwart family of Sikhs. I worked through the last of Ash's changes by the hotel's desklight, and then it was to bed in the wee hours after midnight.

We hit the road to Winnipeg bright and early the next morning, with our simple (revised) plan: we'd make the final changes on the road, and on our way into the city we'd drop this second half of the manuscript off at Winnipeg's airport FedEx depot. We ended up making it in plenty of time for the delivery cutoff, and so by 2 p.m. on Saturday, June 26th the page proofs were safely ensconced in FedEx's capable hands, marked First Overnight, FedEx's fastest and most expensive service to Toronto. They were to arrive before 10 a.m. Monday morning, which gave my editors just enough time for a hectic day to get all the final changes done and off to the printer on time.

Home free, we thought. Phew! We drove to the home of our friends Tarik and Sangye, where we'd be hanging out the rest of the day to enjoy the city's relentless mosquito infestation before pushing on to Nova Scotia. (Sidenote: Frozen solid in winter, steamy and humid and mosquito-plagued in summer – Winnipeg may have the worst climate of any large city on the planet.)

And phew!, we continued to think, as we pushed further east the next day, Sunday. (Another sidenote: Do you doubt that we truly think like this? In onomatopoeia, I mean? Pshaw, I growl in the face of your skepticism. Ouch! Ash twitters as she galonks her toe off a table. But I digress.) Phew! we were thinking, after a long day plowing through the Canadian Shield in Northern Ontario, as we arrived in Thunder Bay that night.

Now, the next day was Monday, June 28th. The day the manuscript was to arrive in Toronto and the day it needed to go to the printer. It was also Election Day. And what a day it was.

We awoke, though, still thinking Phew! We toured the city that morning, visiting the hospital where Ash was born, her grandparents' old house, and her Auntie Mary, and still we thought: Phew! But as much as I was still thinking Phew!, it did occur to me around lunchtime that I should check in with the folks at Random House and make sure everything was okay at their end. It was then that I discovered the FedEx First Overnight package containing the second half of the heavily marked-up (which is to say irreplaceable) page proofs of my manuscript had not yet arrived.

I called FedEx posthaste. A customer-service rep confirmed that the package hadn't arrived, and after a bit of nosing around in my file he added – in what struck me as a grotesquely inappropriate tone of routine ho-hum casualness – that no one knew, just at the moment, where it was. Someone, though, would get back to me before long to let me know what was up. Have a nice day!

Okay, a timeline is probably the best way to enumerate what happened from here on out:

Monday, June 28, 12:30 p.m., Thunder Bay:

I hang up my cell phone after being told my manuscript is missing. I stave off panic with the comforting thought that millions of important packages are sent via FedEx every day, and though I've heard of them arriving late, I've never once heard tell of a FedEx package actually being lost. I head to the Thunder Bay Public Library to hastily compose my acknowledgements for the book, which Random House had requested to be sent immediately when I'd called to ask about package. I bang that out, surely forgetting a few crucially important people due to the circumstances. If any of you are reading this, forgive me!

Monday, June 28, 2:15 p.m., Thunder Bay Public Library Internet Kiosk:

My cell phone rings. It's some dude from FedEx in Winnipeg. He informs me that the package was "scanned in" at Winnipeg, but was never "scanned out" at Pearson Airport in Toronto. He doesn't have much else to tell me. Are you saying you don't know where it is? I inquire in a hushed but angry library stage-whisper. Uh-huh, he basically replies. I ask again. So you're saying you don't know where it is. He confirms. So what the hell's gonna happen? I inquire. We'll let you know as soon as we know anything, says he. Have a nice day!

Monday, June 28, 4:30 p.m., Some gas station or other, Thunder Bay:

We are about to leave town. I call FedEx again to find out what's going on. The random customer-service rep isn't sure what's happening. There is apparently nothing new to report from my file – not even why no one has called me despite the assurances of the dude in Winnipeg. I bark and yell a bit. This is duly noted, and the rep insures me that someone will be in touch within a few hours. I hang up.

Now, I should probably reveal at this point in the story why I'm merely very angry and not apoplectic with rage or else curled up in the fetal position in the gas-station bathroom. The reason: I had made a photocopy of the page proofs – complete with my final edits – before sending them to Toronto. I did this so the changes made to the Canadian edition could be easily and accurately duplicated on the British edition's page proofs when they arrived for editing in Nova Scotia a couple of weeks later. Please note that I took this precaution only because there'd been a little bit of friction in the editorial process with my British publisher, and I was being extra-careful about the final editing process to ensure that everything went really smoothly. Normally I never would've been this careful. Really. Instead of this blog entry, you'd be reading the heart-rending tale by my grieving wife of how my head spontaneously combusted in a gas station on the outskirts of Thunder Bay on the evening of Canada's 2004 federal election. However, it should be mentioned that while I had copies, they were of course in black and white, and somewhat more difficult to read than the red-pen-corrected originals. But, fine, suffice it to say that I did have copies.

Anyhoo, Ash suggests at this point that we just go and make another copy of the damn page proofs and send them to Random House before we leave Thunder Bay, for peace of mind, just in case something is actually going badly wrong at FedEx's end. For some reason I argue strongly against doing any such thing. FedEx, I tell her, does not lose packages. It might misplace them temporarily for a few hours, they might get waylaid or shanghai'd, but FedEx does not lose packages. The strength of my faith in the infallibility of multinational courier companies won out. We drove on, out of Thunder Bay and further eastward, toward our fate.

Monday, June 28, 9:00 p.m., parking lot of some gas station or other, somewhere between Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie:

We have just emerged from a long stretch outside of cell-phone range. There are no new messages. Understand: my First Overnight package is now 12 hours late, its whereabouts are unknown, and FedEx has not contacted me once in seven hours, despite the assurances of the various call-centre people that I would be contacted to let me know how things were going. I call FedEx again, finally ranting and raving at a pitch and volume I haven't used since the time four years ago that I had to negotiate with a particularly obstinate Delhi rickshaw driver. It is around now that Ash starts audio-recording these rants for posterity (and/or for Turner v. FedEx, the newly planned multibillion-dollar negligence lawsuit for my sprained eyeball).

The urgency in my voice is apparently now convincing anough to get me passed up the ranks to a woman in the Toronto Customer Service department. Her name is Chris Carter. I am making a special note of this here, in case some random FedEx executive stumbles upon this story in the process of building a libel suit against me or something. Because frankly, I'd like FedEx to know that this Chris Carter is the only FedEx employee in this entire Saga who I'd call even marginally "competent". In fact, she does an excellent job. She sympathesizes with my plight – not just in a professional way, but also in that kind of holy-crap-what-the-hell-happened-this-is-outrageous personal sort of way that can be so gratifying – and assures me she will succeed where others have failed in finding out what's happened to my package and informing me of same in a timely manner. End transmission. [to come: audio of Turner's Northern Ontario ranting here]

Monday, 28 July, 10:00 p.m., motel parking lot, White River, Ontario:

We stop for the night, hungry for dinner and eager to watch the election returns. Chris Carter, the best employee I encounter at FedEx by such a wide margin that the rest of the gang who dealt with my file should be thought of as place-holders rather than employees, calls with an update. She has reason to believe that my package accidentally got sent to Windsor on an Air Canada flight. (Interesting courier company tidbit: sometimes they send stuff via commercial-airline freight, or even via another courier company, when they can't fit it on one of their own planes.) She also believes that my package will, at any rate, be found, and assures me that a rigourous search has been underway for some time at both the Toronto and Winnipeg depots. She explains that she won't be at work until the following afternoon, but that she's prepared a special briefing for a woman named Veronica as to the particulars of my file and the urgency of dealing with it. I thank her profusely and hang up.

I think it was around this time that I took a good look at my FedEx waybill. The "Conditions of Contract" – the small print on the back that nobody ever reads before leaving their precious documents in the care of FedEx – make for a pretty fascinating read, actually. Here's my favourite passage:

"Limitation of Liability IF NOT GOVERNED BY FEDERAL OR PROVINCIAL LAWS, REGULATIONS, ORDERS OR REQUIREMENTS AS DESCRIBED ABOVE, OUR MAXIMUM LIABILITY FOR DAMAGE, LOSS, DELAY, SHORTAGE, MIS-DELIVERY, NON-DELIVERY, MISINFORMATION OR FAILURE TO PROVIDE INFORMATION IN CONNECTION WITH YOUR SHIPMENT, EVEN IF CAUSED BY OUR NEGLIGENCE OR GROSS NEGLIGENCE, IS LIMITED BY THIS AIR WAYBILL TO $100 PER SHIPMENT, UNLESS YOU DECALRE A HIGHER VALUE FOR CARRIAGE ..."

What I like best is how they take care to include both "NEGLIGENCE" and "GROSS NEGLIGENCE."

Kinda makes you think someone once won a bunch of money in a lawsuit in which it was proven that while FedEx wasn't liable for NEGLIGENCE, they'd actually performed with GROSS NEGLIGENCE… so they'd had to go and add an extra clause to their contract... hmmm?

Tuesday, June 29, 1:10 p.m., side of some busy street, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario:

At the first whiff of cell phone coverage after hours of driving through the emptiness of Northern Ontario (0.0008 people per square kilometer… I think I read that statistic somewhere), I call Veronica at FedEx. She doesn't seem familiar with my file. I start to rant, and she suddenly figures out who I am and why I'm calling. She has nothing new to report. No word from Windsor or anywhere else. Manuscript still lost. I rant awhile, and then get off the phone, hyperventilating. I call Random House. The package is more than a day late, and it's starting to look like we might have to forfeit our place in the printing queue, which could cause all kinds of problems for the timeline of the launch and publicity. [to come: audio of Turner's Sault ranting here]

We drive to the nearest big-box Staples. Ash, worried for my mental health, orders me to stay in the car while she goes in and photocopies the page proofs against my wishes. I'm still desperately clinging to the idea that FedEx will materialize the package and all this won't be necessary.

Tuesday, June 29, 1:40 p.m., Staples parking lot, Sault Ste. Marie:

I talk to Chris "The Only FedEx Employee Not Exhibiting GROSS NEGLIGENCE Just Now" Carter, who just in for her shift and is completely amazed that there's been no new word. She apologizes quite a lot – I believe she uses the phrase "I can't even begin to apologize for this" – and puts me in touch with the guy heading up the hunt for my package in Winnipeg. Without quite saying it, Chris closes by more or less acknowledging that my package is, for all intents and purposes, lost. Gone. I'd thought, until this point, that FedEx didn't actually lose packages. Take heed, folks, and doubt me not: FedEx sometimes loses packages.

Tuesday, June 29, a few minutes later, Staples parking lot, Sault Ste. Marie:

I speak to the dude at FedEx in Winnipeg who'd called me the day before. He's reasonably certain my package is not in Winnipeg. He's a bit apologetic but in a whaddaya-gonna-do sort of way, and offers to resend my documents free of charge. I inform him, somewhat frothing-at-the-mouthily by this point, that he doesn't seem to realize the gravity of the situation. And that I will in fact be resending the package from Sault Ste. Marie, but it'll be a cold day in hell before I send even a kleenexload of my own snot via FedEx ever ever ever again. After conferring again with Random House in Toronto to update them on the new plan, we drive to the nearest Purolator office and send the page proofs via their fastest delivery service. We could drive them to Toronto ourselves in less time, but we've lost nearly a day in our journey across the country to the various delays caused by dealing with the FedEx Saga, and are now on a tight deadline to reach Nova Scotia. We put our trust in Purolator, and roar east down the TransCanada toward the Ontario-Quebec border.

Wednesday, June 30, early morning, Random House of Canada office, Toronto:

The page proofs arrive. Via Purolator. We've lost two days. No one knows yet for sure whether we've lost our place in the print queue. There is talk of possibly having to delay the book's release by days or even weeks.

Wednesday, June 30, late morning, just outside Ste. Hyachinthe, Quebec:

I get a call from a FedEx rep in Calgary, who tells me she has been put in charge of my claim because my home address on the waybill puts me in her jurisdiction. Standing at the side of the road in front of some random farmhouse, I tell her as much of the story as I can relate before the battery in my cell phone dies. Since I know Random House has the photocopied manuscript, I'm in no rush to continue dealing with FedEx's gross negligence on their terms. I tell her I'll get back to her within a few days with further details of how I'll pursue my claim. [to come: audio of Turner's rural Quebec ranting here]

Monday, July 5, morning, Kentville, Nova Scotia:

I awake to a message on my cell phone informing me that FedEx is ready to process my $40 claim. In passing, I'd told the person who'd called six days earlier that it'd cost me "about 40 bucks" to re-photocopy and re-send the document. I don't call back right away, considering how I'm going to word my stern letter to the President of FedEx about the army of morons in his employ.

Wednesday, July 7, afternoon, Malpeque Bay, Prince Edward Island:

Another message on my cell phone. FedEx has located my package. It's ten days late. Ash and I and our great friends the Niedzwieckis are on vacation, and I use the office phone at our picturesque cottage complex to call FedEx. I eventually talk to someone named Lorraine, who purports to be (yet another person) in charge of my file. She notes that they found my package just that morning under the ramp at their facility at Pearson Airport in Toronto. I really wish she hadn't told me this. "Wouldn't that be one of the first places you'd look?" I ask. No satisfactory reply. It still haunts me: Under a ramp. Under a ramp? Under a ramp. Who's in charge of looking under ramps? Someone, surely!

She explains that they're sending the package immediately to its destination. I inform her that it is ten days late and now essentially worthless. Talk turns to compensation. I inform her that $40 doesn't even begin to compensate for what I've endured. I start to explain that I've already learned that when you tell someone, "Hey, guess what – FedEx lost my package," they are stunned. The usual reaction is the same one I had: I didn't know they ever did that. I didn't know that could happen. I point out to Lorraine that before too long I'll be discussing my book – the thing they lost – in the mainstream media in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Australia, and that this is my most compelling anecdote about the pre-publication process thusfar. That "FedEx lost the manuscript. We had to delay the launch and the publicity by a month," could be entirely within the realm of possibility.

Lorraine then begins to explain to me – honest to god – what is meant, in legal terms, by the word "liability." I tell her I know what liability is, and I try to explain to her what is meant by "public relations." She is unconvinced. She informs me several times that my file is quite a large file. She tells me how many pages my file is. I didn't make a note of it, but I believe it was thirtysomething pages, my file. 36? 38? Anyway, she seems to be hinting at something regarding which of us is being unreasonable. I decide not to return to my previous incarnation of the ranter-and-raver, in the interests of being able to return to the PEI vacation with normal blood pressure after this call.

We agree to a $100 claim, which is to say that she notes that this is the best they can do given the contract I signed when I sent the package with them in Winnipeg (the aforementioned waybill that mentions the NEGLIGENCE and the GROSS NEGLIGENCE, as you'll remember), and I hang up. [to come: audio of Turner's PEI ranting here]

Early August, Toronto:

I receive a cheque in the amount of $100 from FedEx. Overall I've estimated that in cell phone bills, extra photocopying, gas expenses involving the Winnipeg FedEx portion of our drive, an extra day's road allowance, the cost of sending both the manuscript by FedEx and the photocopy by Purolator, I've spent well over $250 on their error. We won't even go into the lawsuit I'd file if Canadian law allowed for precedent to set the cash value of mental duress and emotional turmoil caused by their corporate incompetence.

I don't cash the FedEx cheque. Any suggestions for what I should do with it?