UPS Lost My Precious Family Heirloom

It was Friday the 13th, ironically enough, when I packed up my great grandmother's hand-hooked rug and another package of various junk items and handed it to my mom to send out from her Pasadena office via UPS. I had been in town for a funeral and my grandmother decided, much to my delight, to pass the rug on to me.

No, I said, I don't want FedEx or the U.S. Mail, I want Brown. Brown had never let me down.

About seven days later the junk box showed up, label barely attached, box half-destroyed, contents nearly dust.

Oh, well I thought, the other box being heavier must be taking a bit longer, that's ok. The destroyed contents of the junk box were annoying, but not devastating.

It's never shown up.

Three days after the other box arrived I got a call from a woman at UPS. She wanted to know if I had received my package. No, I replied, is it lost. "We are working on it, Mam," she said, and hung up on me.

The complete story is far to long to tell here. But suffice it to say UPS lost something so precious to me it still brings tears every time I see a UPS van. I have very little in the way of family heirlooms, and this rug, more than 100 years old, meant the world. Sometimes I still get a twinge of hope when I see a van pull up on our street and think maybe they found it. No such luck.

UPS, the company, was absolutely horrible to deal with. They put me off at every turn, told me they were looking for it, then told me they were actually not in the same conversation. Trying to get through to the warehouses took detective skills. "Customer Service" either stonewalled me or urged me to take the insurance on the item. I said no, hoping they would instead keep looking.I didn't want to be bought out, I wanted to find my rug. No such luck. I never took the money. There's no value I could put on that rug.

I want to add that, for months, I worked through other lines to try to get my rug back. Doing so I found several UPS employees that helped me as best they could out of the goodness of their heart, and I will be eternally grateful to them. They were wonderful people. Eventually they recommended that I start looking for my rug on E-Bay. They told me that UPS sells it's "lost" items wholesale after a time and that the people who bid on them sometimes re-sell them on internet auction sites like E-Bay. I tried, diligently, but never found it.

I realize that losses are a part of any business, especially the delivery business. But this was not a computer or a book. It was an irreplaceable piece of my family's history. I had much higher hopes of how I would be treated by UPS in light of the fact that this was a special object.

Moral of the story: If you MUST ship a really precious item, honestly my opinion is do it with the post office. Yeah, they lose stuff too, but at least for now it is a Federal agency and you have a far better chance of getting a good search done, which you have little to no chance of with a private company like UPS unless you bang your head against the wall for months and even then it's iffy. Too, you can call your congressman if you have a complaint and you'll probably see some results.