Good news is still Due

Brethren, I take for my text today the Gospel according to FedEx:
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http://www.satviz.com/images/fedex01.jpg
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I skipped the blog entry yesterday, no excuse, boss, except for the fact that since Friday afternoon I've been an unpaid employee of FedEx Ground, trying to get an important shipment the final few miles from their local terminal to our office.

Although FedEx themselves were the originator off online tracking of shipments they still ignore the principal of verifying easily verifiable data in their scheme of things. Nobody cares that a package allegedly travels ~90 ground miles in 6 minutes. (see the activity on 17 March where the package traveled 85 or 90 miles from the facility near Denver International Airport in Henderson, CO to the facility at the Colorado Springs Municipal Airport in 6 minutes. That's roughly 900 miles per hour, not allowing any time to scan the package at both ends .. damn they are fast!)

This kind of result shows that the multi-million dollar system doesn't really track items the way it was designed to, it must be updated manually after the fact by someone who manually types something in to try to disguise the fact that an employee somewhere failed to scan the package when he/she was supposed to.

I won't take issue with all the other lies represented on the screenshot above, (there are many equally as egregious as the one I pointed out), but the fact that the package either rode around two business days on the truck without a second delivery attempt, or sat under the manager's desk at the local facility (my guess) while my company lost tremendous goodwill and perhaps thousands of dollars in future business can easily be proven.

Folks, although I am no fan of our dear departed President Reagan I do remember and take to heart his oft quoted cautionary phrase. "trust but verify". Can customers trust your business? Can they verify that trust? Can you afford to allow your business data to not be verifiable? Obviously, FedEx can, but how many more millions of profit could they clear in a year if they adopted the policy of the three v's : validity, veracity, verisimilitude. Worth a thought? Or a venture in learning more?

Dave
www.satviz.com