Being green is a good thing, except when what you are recycling are tracking numbers.

I ordered Weeds Season 3 on Bluray from Amazon.com for Micheal using my Amazon Prime shipping.  I guess I did it too late in the afternoon on Friday so the package didn’t get shipped out until today, I got an email confirming it this morning.

I went online to check the status of the order and saw this.

You can click the picture to blow it up a bit.  Bottom line, it shipped out today at 6:10:01PM (a few hours after the email I received from Amazon) and was actually delivered already.  In fact, the package went back in time nearly two years!

Thinking this was just an Amazon glitch, I went to UPS and attempted to track the package.

So even UPS states the going back in time business.  Amazing.  Space Time Continuum, that easy.

I called Amazon and they apologized for the confusion, they explained that sometimes UPS recycles their tracking numbers.  I’m not exactly sure why they do this.  There are over 1.775176e+18 combinations of UPS tracking numbers.  That is… more than… 1,775,176,000,000,000,000 possible packages.

Of course, that’s using the simple calculation and shortening it cause I’m lazy, and disregarding the fact that some of the letters and numbers are source/destination designators, not randomly generated.

Even still, this is a little annoying, and a bit funny.