Chasing a lost package

LESSON ONE: In the never-ending war between humankind and machine, humans will always find a way to defeat the "system."

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OK, United Parcel Service lost an overnight package sent to me. I missed the first delivery attempt; the second never happened. I called, I waited, and I was finally told, "At this point, we don't know where it is."

So, I went to http://www.ups.com and found that Company A in Aliquippa, Pa., placed my documents in a UPS envelope and the UPS driver performed an origin scan at 5:09 p.m. EDT. Each UPS driver carries a DIAD (Delivery Information Acquisition Device) that scans in the tracking number plus package details and sends it to headquarters over packet data radio via Motient's Ardis network.

The package was sorted at the local hub, got a departure scan, and was put on a plane heading west. My package arrived in Pittsburgh at 9:45 p.m. EDT. Then it was on to the Grand Lake, Ky., hub, where it left at 12:00 a.m. EDT for Oakland, Calif., arriving at 3:35 a.m. PDT. There were more arrival and departure scans at the final destination, San Francisco, where the package arrived at 8:00 a.m. PDT. UPS attempted a delivery at 10 a.m. I wasn't home, and the driver entered that detail into his or her DIAD. At the end of the day, the driver returned to his or her depot, leaving the package on the truck, according to one UPS supervisor. Foolproof, right? Only now, the package has disappeared.

So what happened to all those scans? What good did they do? UPS is spending about $120 million upgrading its entire wireless system using both the ARDIS network and IEEE 802.11b so that customers can have real-time access to the location of their packages. Eventually, UPS claims customers will know where the truck is on its route so that they don't have to sit around for 15 hours waiting for a delivery.

But it also turns out there are physical scans and what a UPS supervisor called a "logical scan." Once a package is picked up and physically scanned, it is not scanned again until it arrives at its next destination. UPS simply assumes that the package is on the truck on which it is supposed be between the two scans. Now there's a piece of logic that might have a lesson wrapped around it.

In its defense, UPS does handle 13.2 million packages per day. But what's the take-away?

Lesson two: Technology will not solve all of our problems. Five 9s is about as close as we are ever going to get. Taking that thought one more step, we come up with the stunning idea that all our planning must take into account unexpected consequences both from technology and from our fellow man.

Another technology caveat. We've all seen the news reports about how GPS (Global Positioning System) devices can be used to protect our loved ones by always letting us know where they are. Well, I have news for you. We have a tendency to think that only the good guys watch the CBS Evening News. Not so. If you know about the technology so do the bad guys.