FedEx Nightmare

Wow..It's been awhile since my last post. Let me catch you all up. For the last 6 months or so I have been planning on breeding Beebe to Mork, which is a fantastic dog that lives in California. From the beginning I really didn't have a desire to fly Beebe to California to breed her because I would have to take connecting flights and it would just be a big pain. So we planned on Artificially Inseminating her. (Artificially Inseminate = 'AI') So for the last week or so we have been doing vaginal cytology and progesterone tests to find out when she would ovulate. So Wednesday rolls around and her progesterone level is at 2, which means that she should be ovulating somewhere around Friday or Saturday. No normally you want to inseminate 2 days after they ovulate, which would put it on a Sunday. But of course FedEx doesn't ship on Sundays. So we planned on having the Stud Dog owner to ship semen on Friday, for a Saturday delivery and then again on Monday for a Tuesday delivery. So the semen is sent FedEx on Friday and all is good. I'm super excited and can't wait for Saturday morning to pick up the "liquid gold" and take it and Beebe to the vet to be inseminated. So I wake up Saturday morning and check the tracking number and it says that it has left CA, but there is no new information. Now you have to understand that it should have been in Cedar Rapids already by this point. So I'm about to call FedEx when my phone rings. Who is it? The stud dog owner. She tells me that FedEx's plan broke down in Memphis and that it is sitting in Memphis. Of course at this point I'm starting to freak out because chilled semen is only good for so long. So I then get on the phone with FedEx and talk to Francis. After several calls she tells me that there are no FedEx flights into Cedar Rapids on Saturday's and she can't put it on a commercial flight because my Shipping # is not approved because of 9/11. So now I'm really upset, because this shipment of semen was not cheap and it is going to be wasted if it isn't delivered until Monday. So then I ask her if she can get it anywhere close to me at all. So after a lot of checking she says that she can get it to Chicago by 7pm. No remember that this should have arrived in Cedar Rapids by 9am. So I tell her that is fine that I will drive and pick it up because at least then hopefully some of the sperm will still be viable. So off I go to Chicago and pick up the "package" and drive back to Cedar Rapids. Luckily my vet, who I love to death, was willing to come into the office at 10:30pm to inseminate Beebe. So we go through the whole insemination process, which I won't describe here, and then look at the sperm. Luckily the little swimmers were doing pretty good and hopefully all is ok. Now I just have to talk to FedEx and figure out what they are going to do to make what happened right. They said that they would refund the shipping charge, but I think they're going to be doing a lot more than that. So that was my Saturday. AHHHHH.