My Fedex Story

My lab is getting poorer, so I need to get funded to keep my job in the long run. The way to get funded is to write fellowship applications. So I've been writing applications after applications since last summer. Generally it is not easy to get awarded with a fellowship, the success percentage is around 2-8% of the ones I applied for.

When you apply for a fellowship, it's a bit like a combo of writing a term paper and applying for graduate school. You need to get a number of reference letters from famous scientists, and you need to write about what you want to do in the next few years and for the rest of your life. The reference letter part is annoying, because most of the famous scientists are also very busy people, and they tend to wait till the very last minute to give you reference letters.

The writing part is also tough. First you probably want to have as much data as possible, so you would be doing experiments till you really don't have any more time. And then you would like to have your boss read the stuff you wrote before you send it out. Again, most of the time they wait till the last moment to do that.

The result of all these last minute habits is that most people do not send out their applications until the very very last moment.

And this is what happened last week.

One of the deadline was April 1. The application needs to get there by 5PM.
I was not very bad this time, and I actually got the application ready to go before the Fedex people came to our building to pick up the shipments. On top of that, this time I remembered to keep my tracking number.

So I dropped the package off, went home, and found out online that my package was picked up at 8PM, 3/31. The estimate delivery time was 10:30AM on April 1.

I was quite relieved and slept well that night.

On April 1 I had a lot of benchwork, so by the time I could track my package it was almost 5PM. I thought, well, it must have arrived already, but I'll check anyway just to have peace of mind.

And Fedex Tracker told me the package was still in Tennessee at 4:35PM.

It needed to be at Atlanta, Georgia at 5PM. There is no way my application will make the deadline!

I blinked.

I rubbed my eyes.

I reloaded the page and blinked again.

My heart rate went up to probably 150/min, my hands were shaking.

I called Fedex.

The Fedex lady I talked to was actually really nice. I was, on the other hand, not very polite at all. My bad.

She told me that there was a major service interruption, due to a thunderstorm in Tennessee. 65 flights were grounded, so Fedex cannot be responsible for the delay in package deliveries. She said it was an act of God.

After arguing with her for another few minutes, it began to dawn on me how useless my struggle against this act of God is. I thanked her, she apologized, I said it wasn't her fault, and I hung up.

And I started crying in despair.

Despair is never good for anybody. This time it drove my husband into saying the following sentence:
"Maybe it's just an April Fool's joke from Fedex."

And I hit him on the head, hard.

And then I worried for ten seconds that I killed off some of the important neurons in there.

And I started crying again.

The problem with crying, is that you can only do it for so long. It is really quite exhausting physically, and all the time you are doing it you know this activity does not help you achieve anything aside from looking stupid and making people around you say stupid things.

So I stopped, and wrote a groveling email to the funding agency, asking them to accept my application because I have no control over natural disasters.

Couldn't sleep that night.

The following day, the nice people at the funding agency said they extended the deadline by one day because of the storm. And I started tracking on Fedex site every ten minutes. My package got to Atlanta that morning, but was never delivered.

By now I have run out of energy to freak out again. Like the french kid in the South Park movie, I simply muttered, "God hates me".

After three more phone calls to Fedex and another sleepless night, I finally got to speak to someone who knew what was going on. So what happened was, the funding agency's mail room was too small. On the application deadline they got too many packages, so Fedex could not deliver to them any more. And because of the vast number of packages, neither the funding agency nor Fedex could scan through all the packages that were there.

The only thing they could tell me is,
"your package is most likely somewhere around, but we can't confirm it till three weeks from now."

I sighed.

I was not looking forward to the next fellowship, which is due on April 8.

I am, however, thankful that the whole AA aircraft-grounding fiasco did not happend till April 9.