During our first Xmas in this house, our UPS Man brought us a package. I invited him in, telling him, “Come on in! I’m making wonderful cookies!” He was taken aback by a weird young punk inviting him in for cookies, but he tentatively entered and followed me to the kitchen. The house smelled magnificent: nice weed, Russian teacakes, almond balls, and Scottish shortbread. I gathered a whole buncha cookies in a paper towel and handed them to him. He was still kinda in shock as he left with his goodies and I bid him Merry Christmas. Gary became a good friend of ours.
One day mom took him to our back yard to show him the garden - “Almost everything you see, you delivered to us,” she told him. Gary actually wept because it was so beautiful, blooming shrubs, vines, unusual and/or native ferns and flowers everywhere. It was a real showplace. Friends would sit in our garden for awhile if they’d arrived unannounced and found us not at home.
“And to think I bitched that some of those boxes were so heavy!” Gary told her.
{ETA: Gary brought me a box of orchid plants I’d ordered, and I asked him to wait and see what was inside. Since he’d already seen the garden, he was more than willing. I got him some ice water, then carefully opened the box, and slid out a plant. It had been gently put into a paper lunchbag, then into another one on top. I pulled off the top paper bag, to be greeted by a seemingly floating piece of kleenex. I carefully lifted it to reveal a stripey, spotty, hairy lady’s slipper orchid blossom! He’d sent me one in bloom! Gary was as amazed & delighted as I, needless to say. He was V glad he’d stayed to check it out 
}
A later UPS man was simply awful - all fragile items in his tender care invariably arrived broken. He didn’t give a shit, just shrugged & told us, “Aah, just re-order it. It’s no problem.” Didn’t matter if it was something we needed right away; made no difference to him. I began including notes to the ebay sellers from whom we bought breakable items. “Please ship via USPS if poss. Our UPS man thinks ‘fragile’ is an Italian city.” A few years after we finally got a new UPS man (who never brings us any broke up shit), mom remembered something about Mr Fragile.
Years and years before, a UPS driver had hit her car as she was parking at work, and was a total dickhead about it.
She had just then realized it was Mr Fragile!
We never got broken items via UPS before nor after Mr Fragile. [knocks/touches wood]
