Delayed Gratification

A few of my Christmas gifts were ordered online and there were shipping delays: the Embody office chair and a hard drive.

The hard drive made it to our house today. However, the process ran into a little snag. A snag which will have some implications for when the new chair arrives.

The hard drive is an external 1 Terabyte G-Drive. A fanless, aluminum enclosed hard drive. Quiet and reliable. I currently have three external G-Drives on my main computer. One RAID drive for backups. One drive dedicated to Time Machine backups. And one drive dedicated to photography. The computer drive contains Mac OS X, several virtual machines for Windows 7, Vista, Linux and all my documents, family snapshots, music and other related files.

The new hard drive will take over the heavy lifting on the photography side. I take a lot of photos. I use a lot of storage.

The little snag relates to delivery of said hard drive.

The unit shipping weight is a little over 6 pounds. The box about the size of a shoebox. When UPS came to deliver the package, they took one look at our rural driveway and freaked out. No way were they going to try and drive up the hill to our house. Too dangerous.

They called to tell us that we would have to come down to their depot to pick up the package. No big deal. I drove up to the warehouse, claimed my package, and went on my way. No issues navigating the driveway in my 4WD car — with all season radials no less.

I could appreciate how the appearance of snow on a long driveway in the country would be frightening to the UPS delivery team. Fedex, on the other hand, seems to have no issue whatsoever in making the hike up the hill.

But what about the chair? It is much heavier and much larger than the hard drive. Too large to fit in either one of our cars. If it comes via UPS, I am going to have to find an alternate way of transporting the chair from the warehouse to our home. And I will need to find some friends capable of helping me lift the fully boxed chair. The chair weighs about 65 pounds without the shipping container.

Here is hoping that the chair comes via Fedex.