I can’t believe it! After all the phone calls, the headaches, and a few calls to Bat­man and Sher­lock Holmes, my Wii has made it safely home. It feels like Christ­mas in July around the ol’ Wat­son house. We haven’t even fin­ished open­ing all of Bret’s Wii games that he got under the tree last year. He and I have played Mario Super Slug­gers (which is great!), Gui­ness World Records, and more.

Partly in honor of our Wii’s home­com­ing, partly out of want­ing to “pound” UPS for there bum­bling ways, but mostly out of a self­ish need to relive my child­hood… I bought Punch-Out for the Wii. I can’t even imag­ine how many hours I wasted on this game as a child. Now, com­pletely revis­ited for mod­ern times, my son can get as frus­trated as I was while try­ing to find the “secret tricks” to defeat­ing these characters.

We put this game into our freshly repaired and returned Wii together and it was like I was a kid again. Yes, all of my old adver­saries were there! Glass Joe, King Hippo, Soda Popin­ski, Bald Bull, and more were on hand to chal­lenge my child as they had chal­lenged me. Between each bout, Doc had his cryp­tic “words of wis­dom” on how to beat each oppo­nent. Of course they were faith­fully mixed in amongst his announc­ing his love of choco­late and beg­ging us to join the “Nin­tendo Fun… er, um… Club Nintendo”.

It is fun to watch Bret get so exas­per­ated try­ing to fig­ure out the “spe­cial trick” needed to beat each new con­tender. Just like Dad. Then I get to come in and finally show him a thing or two about how its done… Old school. Punch-Out is a wel­come addi­tion to our game library. It really is like an old friend com­ing to visit after many years. And best of all, after game after game of Bret humil­i­at­ing me in Mario Super Slug­gers, I can throw this game in and get some small mea­sure of revenge.

Over the years I have had many frus­trat­ing moments deal­ing with UPS, but recently I had an expe­ri­ence with “Big Brown” that really takes the tro­phy. Our Nin­tendo Wii had been mal­func­tion­ing since late Decem­ber 2008. I had tried every­thing humanly pos­si­ble to find a local busi­ness that was licensed to repair my lit­tle white box. The war­ranty had con­ve­niently expired and I really didn’t trust ship­ping my lit­tle friend off to some dis­tant loca­tion. After months of search­ing in vain, I bit the bul­let and called Nin­tendo of Amer­ica to sched­ule a repair.

After two days of attempt­ing to find a cus­tomer sup­port num­ber on their web­site, thirty min­utes of answer­ing auto­mated ques­tions that each sent me spi­ral­ing to wrong exten­sions, and three dis­con­nects, I finally reached a live sup­port per­son. She was a charm­ing lady that reas­sured me that the process of send­ing my Wii off for repair was in fact an easy one. I explained to her my dis­trust of UPS, but she held firm to her con­vic­tion that noth­ing would go wrong. She assured me that in any event I would have a work­ing Wii in between 11–16 days. I paid an $85 flat repair fee that also cov­ered ship­ping with UPS both ways and began prepar­ing my Wii for what would be a most con­found­ing journey.

My Wii with UPS.

After care­fully pack­ing my Wii for its trav­els, I was informed that I would have to drive 25 miles to a spe­cific UPS drop off loca­tion. Wow… What?! So Bret and I drove it down to Ander­son, SC and bid our Wii farewell. On July 3, I noticed the brown UPS truck out at the end of my dri­ve­way. I thought to myself that it couldn’t be our Wii because we had received no word from Nin­tendo of its repair com­ple­tion or immi­nent arrival. I walked out through my garage and stood in the dri­ve­way as I lis­tened to the dri­ver rum­mag­ing through his truck. This went on for around five min­utes as I waited patiently to ask him if there was a pack­age for me. In a flash, he darted from the back of the truck towards his seat. I took a step for­ward with hand up and mouth open to speak. Our eyes met but his shifted hur­riedly away as his foot ham­mered down on the gas. Hmmmm.… Inter­est­ing I thought.

I went inside and searched the Nin­tendo web­site for a way of get­ting an update since I had received none. I put in my repair num­ber and it informed me that the repair had been made and UPS should be deliv­er­ing it this very day. Cool! But that doesn’t explain the odd behav­ior of the UPS dri­ver. Armed now with a track­ing num­ber, I vis­ited “big brown” online. Ahh! It had indeed shipped. But, wait! The dri­ver reported that I was, and I quote, “Closed for Hol­i­day”. What??

I called UPS and after giv­ing me the runaround, they told me that my local ship­ping cen­ter would be call­ing me to dis­cuss it fur­ther. I asked for the num­ber so that I could call them myself, but was told that he couldn’t do that as my local ship­ping cen­ter wasn’t equipped to take calls. He assured me that they would be call­ing me within the hour. Sure enough, the one thing UPS deliv­ered on time was the promised phone call.

An ille­gal alien and guard dogs. Really?!

The rep­re­sen­ta­tive informed me that UPS had “mis­placed” my Wii. It seems that some­one, I am assum­ing it was Moe, Larry, or Curly, had scanned it as res­i­den­tial, but placed it on the wrong belt. The belt my wii was con­demned to was for busi­ness pack­ages that could not be deliv­ered on a hol­i­day week­end. It gets bet­ter. I offered to drive to their loca­tion to pick it up myself. Why not? After all, I had to drive 25 miles to per­son­ally hand deliver it in the first place. I was then informed that that would be impos­si­ble because it was being stored with “hun­dreds of thou­sands of  busi­ness pack­ages” and could not be located at this time.

The rep­re­sen­ta­tive went on to assure me that they would locate it even­tu­ally. She tried to con­sole me by let­ting me know that they would be vig­or­ously search­ing for it among the busi­ness pack­ages on Mon­day. I asked her if the team com­ing in was more com­pe­tent then the team she had work­ing at the time of my call, because they couldn’t find it.  She paused and just said, “It’s a dif­fer­ent team”.

I asked her why a UPS truck showed up empty handed at my home with no expla­na­tion. She said that since it was scanned as res­i­den­tial, he thought it was on the truck. It was still show­ing up as “on the truck” in her com­puter. I described his behav­ior and how he didn’t even take the time to let me know why he was there or give me time to ask the ques­tion. She didn’t know what to say, but told me that if it doesn’t turn up I can “sim­ply” con­tact the ship­per and have them file a claim. I hung up frus­trated. As I await to see how this sit­u­a­tion unfolds, I have the odd feel­ing that some­where over the Fourth of July week­end, Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Earhart are enjoy­ing a rous­ing game of Mario Kart on MY Wii!!