FedEx accidentally sent $5,000 worth of Zdeno Chara’s sticks to some random guy

By now you've probably heard the news, possibly via carrier pigeon, but the mail delivery system in America isn't doing so hot right now. With millions of Americans now relying on package delivery for things they would go out and source themselves if it weren’t for the threat of a contagious and deadly disease, our postal infrastructure—further hindered by recent budget cuts—has bowed under the added weight. Private carriers like Amazon, UPS, and FedEx have attempted to shoulder some of the load (at triple the cost), but they too have felt the burden. Just last week, the folks in orange and purple delivered a 70-pound international package of mine to a bodega on a completely different street, providing no notice of its location other than that it had been delivered to my general New York neighborhood. Through sheer dumb luck, I was able to track it down and ferry it home via borrowed dolly, but there’s no telling if the Washington Capitals—who had $5,000 worth of Zdeno Chara’s sticks delivered to random dude’s house on Monday—will be quite that fortunate.

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Imagine rolling out of bed in the morning, pouring yourself a nice hot cup of joe, only to look out the window and see a giant box of hockey sticks addressed to a professional NHL outfit sitting on your porch. You drag them inside, scrape the hardwood floor while the dogs bark like maniacs, spend 15 minutes prying staples out of the reinforced cardboard, only to realize you can’t even cop one of these bad boys for yourself because they belong to a 6’ 9” Slovalkian mountain man. Oh, and if you call FedEx for support, they’ll ask you to enter your tracking number, which you probably don’t have because, you know, IT’S NOT YOUR PACKAGE, so there’s a less-than-zero-percent chance in frozen-over hell you’re going to get an actual human being on the phone. Now you’re on your own with $5,000 worth of hockey sticks and not an open rink within 100 miles. That, folks, is our current postal situation in a nutshell.

But hey, at least Ariel here got a funny tweet out of it . . . until Chara comes looking for his twigs, that is.