For three years Noel Ashby put her livelihood in the hands of the Federal Express Corporation. The Wicker Park textile designer made a nice living creating abstract and representational patterns out of gouache and odd bits of found materials like fabric, colored paper, wire, and metal washers. After mounting them on bristol board, she sold them for $900 to $1,000 apiece to furniture and fabric manufacturers like Steelcase, F. Schumacher & Co., and Donghia, who would in turn use her designs for upholstery, curtains, wallpaper, and bedspreads. Julia Roberts even insulted one of her neckties in Erin Brockovich.
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But by late Tuesday afternoon the portfolio hadn’t arrived, and Ashby was worried. “So finally I called FedEx and I’m like, ‘My package hasn’t come yet.’ And they go, ‘Yes it has.’ And I said, ‘No, I’ve been here all day.’” The operator said the computer record showed that the package had been delivered and signed for the previous day. Ashby demanded to speak with a manager, saying she’d never signed for it. The manager said his records showed that the signature release had been signed by an “Ashby” or “A. Shby.”
The manager told Ashby she’d have to wait until the following day to find out what happened. She insisted that he contact the driver immediately. Later he called back to say that he had the driver’s number, but that her line was busy. “I told him that he needed to keep trying,” says Ashby.
She continued to call FedEx and repeat her story to different people, receiving promises of return calls that never came. The one call she did receive came from a customer service representative who asked her if she needed mailing supplies. “She’s like, ‘How’s FedEx going for you?’ Nobody at all did any kind of damage control, really.”
A FedEx operator told me that shipping artwork at the maximum allowable declared value of $500 costs an additional $2.50. And though FedEx repeatedly states that it doesn’t sell insurance, she was able to transfer my call directly to an operator for the Transglobal Insurance Corporation. He said his company sells cargo insurance for FedEx deliveries at the cost of one percent of the declared value.
For months she struggled in the unfamiliar territory of civil procedure. FedEx threw stacks of documents at her, including demands for discovery and preliminary arguments. “It just took a ton of energy,” she says. “I would spend days typing interrogatories.” Ashby filed her own motions for discovery, seeking to depose Bryant and obtain her disciplinary records. But the judge turned her down, because Bryant was not named in the lawsuit.
In July, FedEx senior attorney Robert Ross offered Ashby $5,000 to settle the case. See you in court, said Ashby. Now the case is in the discovery phase. Check hopes to depose Bryant in November. He hopes to go to trial sometime around the new year.
