The Saga of the Time-Traveling FedEx Slips

Not pictured: H.G. Wells, Dr. Who, or Kathryn Janeway

About a week ago, I got a notice on my door from FedEx saying that this was my third and final notice, and I now had to go pick up my package from their delivery center way down in Emeryville. The thing is, that was the first I'd heard of it. I called them to complain, and they apologized, saying that their system showed two previous delivery attempts, but the delivery person should have left a slip at each attempt. They offered to send it again, but I said I'd just go pick it up.

So I biked down to Emeryville and picked up the package. It was my new phone, by the way, so send me an email if you'd like the new number. Anyway, I figured it was an inconvenience, but I'd live.

Then a weird thing happened: a few days later, I got a notice on my door saying it was the first delivery attempt. But that's not the weirdest part: the date on the notice was several days before the final notice's date (and about a week before the date the slip mysteriously appeared on my door). And sure enough, the next day I got the "second" notice, dated the day after the "first," both for an item I had already retrieved.

In an attempt to cause a rift in the space-time continuum, I looked up the number for the second slip on the FedEx website. The site found no such package.

There are only two possibilities I can think of:

* The delivery person found out that I was unhappy about not receiving the first two notices, and figured that I must really, really love notices. In this hypothetical delivery person's brain, the notices themselves must have some totemic quality, an intrinsic value separate from the package itself. Thus, the delivery person, out of the goodness of his/her heart, decided to grant me my beloved slips, and posted them on my door.

* The slips were posted on the days they were supposed to, but slipped through a rift in space-time and ended up on my door about a week later than they should have.

I honestly can't think of any other explanations. I've considered a few, but had to reject them:

* The slip was posted on time, but it fell off my door, and a helpful neighbor saw it a few days later and replaced it. But how do you explain the second slip also appearing, a day later?

* The two mysterious slips were actually for a second, unrelated package. So why were the dates off by several days, and why didn't anything come up when I looked them up on the website?

If you can think of any other explanation, please let me know. Just look for the guy in the tin-foil hat.