How laptop delivery breaks
This page explains some common problems that might be the reason for your XO not having arrived yet. For an explanation of how laptop delivery was hypothetically supposed to work, see How laptop delivery works.
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NOTE: The contents of this page are not set in stone, and are subject to change! This page is a draft in active flux ... |
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1. The initial shipping address was a PO Box. Brightstar's contract with FedEx didn't allow shipping to PO Boxes. When it was first discovered that Paypal orders could indeed have PO Boxes as their shipping addresses, the first response was that staffers at Patriot (who already didn't have enough time/people to answer the calls they were getting) were also asked to call or write to everyone to get a deliverable address. Needless to say, many donors weren't contacted.
The second, and apparently current, solution was for Brightstar to open a special account with UPS, which will be able deliver to PO Boxes.
2. The shipping address contained more than one address line. An severe bug in the fulfillment software (of unknown origin, but likely at Patriot) caused many Give One Get One donors who paid via Paypal and other indirect means to have their shipping addresses truncated in the Patriot shipping database. This happened if the street address had more than one line - as, for example, anyone who tried to ship to their work address "care of" their company's name. This apparently affected a huge number of donor's orders.
For example, a hypothetical G1G1 Donor "Nick" might have had his address transmitted from Paypal to Patriot as:
Nick Blancoputty c/o Laptops Aren't Us, Inc 1234 Scrod Lane Boston, MA 10506
But in the Patriot database, and therefore in the Brightstar shipment database, it would have been recorded only as:
Nick Blancoputty c/o Laptops Aren't Us, Inc Boston, MA 10506
...which obviously is not a valid shipping address.
There has been much comment online concerning this problem, especially among the donors whose shipments were or still are affected by it. That the problem:
- existed in a modern order-fulfillment system in the first place;
- was not corrected by Patriot or OLPC after it was found (eg, by going back to the source Paypal confirmation data to retrieve the missing address fields from the orders);
- was never acknowledged by Patriot or OLPC (eg, by claiming all address issues were caused by PO Box addresses - see below)
and that
- donors who were affected by the problem were never pro-actively contacted to explain and correct the situation;
- that due to a severe lack of systems and database coordination between Patriot and Brightstar, many donors found it impossible to correct their addresses even after repeated calls and emails to Patriot;
...have all been great sources of frustration for a large number of Give One Get One donors, many of whom are still without their XOs, months after their payments were taken by the OLPC Foundation.
3. FedEx might not have been able to deliver to the address given, for whatever reason. If the laptop is returned as unable to deliver or RMA (replacement request) it goes to Brightstar. Brightstar doesn't have email addresses or the ability to send out messages to donor base. Notifications about shipping have to go back to Patriot to get sent out to donors. This takes a long time, and there are a lot of bottlenecked-up places where things could get lost along the way.
There are a number of reports from donors that the online address-verification system being used by Brightstar and/or Patriot is much too sensitive to small variations in addresses, has a high "false-negative" rate (eg, flagging an address as unshippable when it is not), and was only intended by FedEx to be used for address correction, not as a bright-line test for whether an address is shippable or not.