Monday, January 02, 2006

While I'm on this subject...

At the risk of revealing that I really am a middle-aged curmudgeon, here is a companion piece to my rant about Lenovo. The subject this time is UPS. We ordered a new bed for our dog a short while back, and arranged for UPS to ship it. No one was at home the first day they tried to deliver it, and they left a note saying we could ring up to set a new delivery time. This actually seemed to mean a new delivery day, as they wouldn’t commit to any specific time: it could be from 9am until 7pm., they said. As the dog by this stage was weak from lack of sleep, I stayed in all day so as not to miss it. No UPS delivery. Oh dear, they said, tomorrow we’ll deliver it in a mutually agreed two-hour window. Again, no delivery the entire day.

Contacting UPS, by the way, means ringing a central number, navigating the call center, and talking to a person who says it’ll all be OK, but otherwise has no power to set the delivery time. If you call the local depot, the phone rings and rings and rings, but no-one answers. So the next time we called, we escalated it to a supervisor. After checking with the local depot, he told us that the bed wasn’t delivered the last time because they had put it in a big trailer out the back, but they weren’t sure which one, and they’d forgotten all about it anyway. Tomorrow they’ll be trying again. If it fails this time, I’m strongly tempted to ship them a small package delivered by the dog.

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