Follow-Up To "Your Package Has Been Eaten By An Alligator"

When I posted my bemused reaction to being told that a late package had been "eaten by an alligator" on Saturday morning, I figured the story--which, contrary to the suspicions of many online commentors, was absolutely true--would get a few laughs. I was cracking up myself after getting over being gobsmacked into stunned silence.

What I didn't expect was that the story--helped along by a post at Consumerist--would be all over everything within 48 hours. Here's a sampling of the links I turned up in five minutes of Googling:

Huffington Post

Seattle Weekly

Digg (WHOO-HOO!)

Manolith

CPU Review

Racked

Fark (YES!)

Cracked

Triple-M

USA Today (Okay, this one is just an aggregator catch, but still.)

As my buddy Lein Shory put it, "You spend all that time writing stuff and then you write a story about alligators eating your stuff and it's everywhere. That's the Internet."

Oh, and the package? Never showed up. The one and only item in the shipper's tracking record, dated last Wednesday, is, "Shipment has left seller facility and is in transit." So for all I know, there really is an alligator out there with a chomped-up Gigabyte motherboard in its gullet.

The ending is a happy one: Amazon priority-shipped me a replacement, which arrived Monday morning and is operating normally.

UPDATE: FAKE STEVE JOBS! (Guess it's a good thing I didn't mention the board is for a Hackintosh...)

UPDATE UPDATE: This post at German blog Basic Thinking made my German-speaking wife's entire week. Great graphic, too.

Finally (I think), here's a blurb from the New York Daily News. I got an email from the reporter yesterday, but didn't get a chance to return it until last night. Guess she decided to go ahead and run with the blog post.

ANOTHER: Here's a great article on the Alligator Incident from Chris Matyszczyk at CNET.