One of the oddest customer service stories…

… to date.

I can’t remember what the woman ordered, exactly. But Eric still has the shipping records for keepsake purposes. It’s these kinds of stories we line our memory boxes with so our posterity can know just what kind of craziness we sometimes went through all in the name of providing cloth diaper fabric to the world.

The shipping records are an important part of this story because they have the weight of the package shipped printed on them.

When the woman received her package, she claimed it was full of “sticky notes and invoices” and nothing else. It was her first time ordering with us, so she didn’t have a relationship with us, and we didn’t have one with her. On her end, I’m sure it felt like perhaps we’d scammed her. Charging her for lovely fabric and sending an odd assortment of scrap paper instead. On our end, my husband was suspicious. Anyone he doesn’t know claiming they didn’t receive what he knew very well he sent? Red flag.

I, as I often am (at least when it’s not that time of the month), was the voice of calm reason. I pointed out that it was probably a Fed Ex issue. Perhaps the package split open and some employee in some shipping department somewhere lost the fabric and taped up some papers he thought had fallen out of it. C’mon, it’s not so far fetched right? Those of you who ship packages world wide every single day know that sometimes really weird things happen to your stuff. If I could attach little cameras to those beat up packages that come back from overseas, cut into, taped back together, and arrive back on our doorstep 2 months after we shipped them, I’m sure it would be a sight to behold.

This package wasn’t international though. It was domestic. And baffling.

We talked to the customer, explained we would never in a million years send a package of scrap paper. We don’t even own a sticky note pad! Told her we’d file a claim with Fed Ex, because obviously something went awry somewhere.

Fed Ex conducted their usual investigation. Package arrived at destination? Check. Um, excuse me, yes the package arrived, but the contents inside (allegedly) DID NOT.

I asked her to please send photographs of the package or send the whole thing back so we could see just what kind of weird papers had been shipped to her. I’d certainly recognize papers from our shop. But she never did.

Many emails and phone calls later, the woman ended up filing a report with the BBB and Eric filed a report with the DSATTCAT (Don’t Sell Anything to This Customer Again Team), which entails writing her name on a piece of paper and pinning it to the wall above his desk.

So, what do you think? Did Fed Ex mess up along the way, or was this woman trying to scam us in a very creative, but odd way? I for one like to give people the benefit of the doubt and place the blame on an employee at Fed Ex, but who knows. There are some strange ducks out there, no?