Just days after UPS made a four-year-old boy’s wish of becoming a delivery driver come true by giving him his very own mini UPS truck, complaints from neighbors have brought the young lad’s Christmas dream to an end.
In a heartwarming ad released Dec. 1, Carson Kight is shown getting the truck. Kight, who already had his own UPS uniform, had been obsessed with driving a UPS truck, just like his local driver “Mr. Ernie,” who had been delivering a special baby formula to the family three times a week since the boy’s birth.
The driver, Ernest Lagasca, had taken a shine to the boy, too, over the years, and mom Karen Kight told The Dandy Goat, “He asked him at about age two-and-a-half, ‘You wanna see my truck?’ And he took off with Ernie like there was no tomorrow.”
The UPS ad chronicling their day shows the boy driving round to neighbors, following a map he’s drawn in crayon, and dropping off packages of cookies and muffins. But the reality of daily life as a UPS driver turned out to be something quite different.
“He looked so cute in his little uniform,” said neighbor Twomey Tharp. “And we all got a big kick out of seeing him driving around delivering his little packages. But after a few days he just started throwing them from his truck onto the porch, and then just onto the driveway. The cookies he delivered were all smashed up. And we had ordered some expensive German Christmas ornaments, and those ended up lying in the drive. They got rained on, then my husband accidentally reversed the car over them.”
Kight is also alleged to have pilfered cookies and other Christmas candy from packages he was supposed to deliver, and local people claim to have seen him stuffing the sweet goodies into his mouth as he made his rounds.
Other neighbors captured Kight on home CCTV flinging packages out of his speeding truck. “I don’t know if it was all the sugar, or if he got lazy, or if it was pressure from management, but it was like he just stopped caring,” said local resident Tyler Farn. “It’s sad really.”
Another neighbor, Carry Koch, said that Kight unloaded a torrent of sugar-fuelled abuse at her after she failed to give him a Christmas tip when he mistakingly delivered a battered package intended for a neighbor.
The final straw came when Kight’s truck mounted a curb near his home and collided with a lighted reindeer Christmas decoration in a neighbor’s front yard. A toxicology report showed that the youngster had nearly four times the FDA-approved level of sugar in his blood.
UPS spokesman Matt Curry told the Dandy Goat: “It doesn’t matter how cute and loveable they are, we expect the highest standards of professional behavior at all times from those who wear the brown uniform. Clearly Mr. Kight has fallen short of those standards, and as a result he will be assigned to a different route until the media frenzy has died down.”