Twitter Me Gently

"Twitter me gently, twitter me sweet.
I’ll follow you anywhere you tweet.
The system is fragile, the birds are weak.
So twitter me gently and I’ll be complete."
-Matthew Ebel, Twitter Me Gently

It's that time of year again. Time for me to start ordering all the things that will break be used at Furry Weekend Atlanta this year.

One of the things we're doing this year is retiring our thin-client based registration and sales system in favor of more modern, small form factor computers. The thin clients have worked well for 5 years now, but they're getting increasingly hard to find and expensive to use. So the new system will be based on used Dell GX-270 SFF machines running Ubuntu Linux to avoid any licensing issues.

So I soured the web for a merchant that would cut us a deal on 20 of these machines, and finally found one. 20 machines for $1300 including shipping, or $65 a machine, is about what we were paying for the thin clients, and these will have a lot better lifespan and be eminently more usable. They also support wireless, so less running cable!

So I placed the order Friday two weeks ago. And within hours I had shipping information. And then I found out about Sarah's grandfather and that we'd be going out of town precisely when FedEx was supposed to deliver the computers. Crap. So I call FedEx and arrange to have them delivered the following Monday when I will be home.

So fast forward to Thursday. Just after the funeral. We're eating lunch at the post-funeral meal, and my phone buzzes. I check. Emails from FedEx saying they've delivered all 20 boxes to my house in Alabama. Where its raining. Great. Wonderful. 20 boxes are probably sitting in the rain in front of my house. So I call FedEx. The agent on the phone was singularly unhelpful, too. He just said, yeah, they've been delivered, nothing he could do about it or knew why it happened.

I called koakako and asked him to run by my house and rescue them when he got a change. Then, in frustration, I sent out a tweet: "So Fedex just really fucked me. And not in the good way either."

About 20 minutes later, my phone buzzed again. Someone had replied to my tweet ... from FedEx, asking me what the problem was. I replied back with a few tweets about how $1300 in computer equipment was sitting in front of my house when I was 1,000 miles away, and sent her a tracking number.

Didn't hear anything for about an hour and a half.

Then, I got a tweet back. "The terminal sent a driver to pick up your packages. They are now on hold."

Yay Twitter. And sure enough, Monday afternoon, my packages were delivered. So while I still don't know why my message to hold the packages was never received here, I nonetheless applaud FedEx for using a very Web 2.0 way to solve the problem.