stupidity does vex me

So I've been more or less patiently waiting for UPS to deliver a package that was scheduled to arrive yesterday. Tracking it on their site (yay the web) I saw it was out for delivery as originally scheduled but was bounced back to the hub noting "correct street #" needed. Checking that my email receipt from the retailer had the correct address, I called UPS.

The customer service rep verified that the address they had was correct, but on hearing the number was 2020, asked if it was on the corner. "No," I said. "Well, most of the time 2020 is on the corner," she said. "It's common knowledge," as if it were reasonable and justifiable for a delivery company to give up looking for an address if it didn't support so faulty a heuristic as that a number that's an even hundred must be on a street corner.

Note to customer service reps everywhere: when your company really did screw up, the right response is to say "sorry, we screwed up." and to make amends. The wrong response is to suggest that the customer is unreasonable to have possibly expected the company to not screw up.