Good Samaritans to complete delivery of rescued packages

An Annapolis Valley woman is grateful for honest people and an online Facebook page created to post images of wayward packages.

Paige Milligan, who lives in White Rock, N.S., near New Minas, will be getting her order from online retailer Temu thanks to Vicky Dorey's efforts to track down the owners of five packages she and her co-workers found in a ditch in Halifax's Bayers Lake Business Park.

Dorey said they were on a noon-hour walk Wednesday when they came across packages strewn along the side of the road.

"We noticed five packages in the ditch right beside the sidewalk," said Dorey. "I recognized them as Temu packages."

She said they retrieved the parcels, took them back to their workplace and photographed the address labels, then posted the images to the Nova Scotia Lost Packages page set up on Facebook.

Milligan learned one of the wayward packages was hers when her stepdaughter's mom saw the post and called to ask if she had ordered something from Temu.

"She's like, well, I think somebody found it in a ditch in Bayers Lake," Milligan said with a laugh. "I found it kind of funny and reached out to the woman who made the original post."

According to Milligan, a tracking site had logged her parcel as having been delivered.

Getting the packages to their rightful owners has been a team effort, Dorey said.

One of the parcels originally bound for Mount Uniacke, about 40 kilometres north of Halifax, has already been picked up. Four more that were meant for the Valley will be making their way there over the next few days, she added.

Milligan said what Dorey did was "amazing."

"I think that there should be more people out there like Vicky," said Milligan, who said there seemed to be a "trend" of people finding discarded packages. 

"[It's] a little unnerving," she said. "I have some Christmas presents coming from Amazon, so now I'm a little worried that maybe they might end up in the same situation."

In this case, the packages were all being handled by Straightship, a shipping company based in Burnaby, B.C.

In an emailed response to CBC about a flurry of misplaced packages, representative Kevin O'Byrne wrote, "We expect all our drivers and local delivery partners to handle each and every package with due care — with no exceptions."

He went on to note, "We apologize for instances in which our service did not meet the quality of care standards our customers have come to expect."

Milligan said her parcel didn't contain Christmas presents but rather a blanket and a kitchen gadget for slicing vegetables.

"Kinda comical for me because I'm not really relying too much on the packages. For other people, it's not quite so funny."