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Man claims UPS ‘trapped’ him in his house with Amazon delivery – CNET

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Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that’s taken over our lives.

amazondoor

That looks unfortunate

screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

When Amazon starts delivering by drone, perhaps this sort of thing won’t happen.

Until then human error may occur.

At least that’s what Jessie Lawrence likely believes after he posted a photo of an Amazon package — delivered, he said, by UPS — that left him with little room for maneuver, a constantly crashing Twitter app on his phone and a slight wonderment at humanity’s ability to rage for days.

That’s what happens when you progressively become the thing that Twitter wants to discuss.

On Sunday, he tweeted an image of a long, thin Amazon package wedged under his doorknob that could well have jammed the Bay Area resident in his apartment. 

“Hey @UPS, your driver left this package under our door knob like this and trapped us in our apartment,” he added to the tweet. “Had to call maintenance to get out.” 

Lawrence, social media manager for Twitch eSports, saw this image enjoy more than 156,000 likes and 60,000 retweets. 

This overload caused him to observe late on Monday: “Can’t even check my mentions without the @twitter mobile app crashing.”

By Tuesday, he was marveling: “People get really angry about doors.”

It’s the nature of Twitter, indeed, for some to offer slightly thoughtless comments, such as that he should try to turn his door handle up rather than down.

Or that this was a silly thing to post, as his door surely opened inward, so what was the problem?

Lawrence didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did Amazon. A UPS spokesman, however, told me on Tuesday that his company was looking into the incident.

Of course, some will imagine that it wasn’t the UPS driver who might have jammed Lawrence in, but a mean-spirited neighbor. Or, indeed, that this was just a stunt.

UPS told me that its drivers are trained in the appropriate ways to leave packages. 

In the past, delivery drivers from many companies have occasionally been a little wayward in their practices. Who, for example, could forget the computer monitor that was tossed over a fence by a FedEx driver?

For its part, UPS fired a courier for tossing a Zappos delivery onto a doorstep and then offering a middle finger to a security camera.

And what about the USPS delivery man who delivered a hard drive by tossing it like a bowling ball?

In Lawrence’s case, he didn’t seem very impressed when he contacted UPS on Twitter and received an ill-spelled response: “I’m sorry your [sic] for this. I’ll be glad to assist you. Please click the link below to DM us the details of your concern.”

The details of the concern seemed a touch obvious.

Still, as Lawrence himself explained on Twitter, this could have been worse: “Sure, it’s inconvenient for us to call someone to get us out but if it were an emergency, we would have been screwed. We’re 5 floors up.”