I work at an office supply store that also functions as a UPS ship center. We’re not actually affiliated with UPS, we just take your packages and your money and hand them off to the UPS guy at 5:00 every weekday. Our UPS-provided computer has a built-in address verifier, provides us with prices and delivery times, and prompts us for the information necessary to get the package delivered. For any service other than Ground (so any Air package, any Worldwide package, etc), the computer requires input of a contact number for the addressee. No one EVER consents to give me one. “I don’t know,” they say, or “Why the hell do you need that?” or “Just put mine down there.” Way to defeat the fucking purpose…
The majority of my deliveries are UPS or FedEx. UPS knocks on the door and sprints back to the truck, so as not to waste time getting a signature. FedEx just kind of sneaks up to the door and leaves my packages unannounced.
But I’ve had 3 DHL deliveries since September, and all three drivers have rung the doorbell, waited, actually greeted me warmly, obtained a signature, and handed me my package. One guy delivered yesterday in the snow…he still waited for me to come to the door and get my package even though he was shivering cold.
Very nice. I never get that from UPS or FedEx.
A homemade Yugo is still better than the original factory version. Unless the builder is the type that needs the instructions for setting up an inflatable kiddie pool.
Side note: Know why Yugo’s have rear defrosters? Too keep your hands warm when pushing it in the winter.
DHL = Damaged, Hidden, Lost
Shipped an overnight DHL letter from San Francisco to Carlsbad, CA two weeks ago. It didn’t arrive the next day. It didn’t arrive the day after. It didn’t arrive. Period. First attempt to track it showed the item entering a DHL facility in Fresno (IIRC) but never leaving. OK, so maybe it jumped off a belt or is otherwise stuck in that building. Nope. My best guess is it decided to stick to something else in such a way that it wasn’t noticed and scanned on the way out, as tracking now shows it’s in Ohio. OHIO! I’m not placing any bets that it will come back to any destination in California before 2005.
Why doesn’t everyone just have the guy leave it in their super’s office? Works great for me.
g,d,&r
DHL once lost my boss’s immigration paperwork for 4 days. It was being shipped via overnight from London. They knew it cleared customs in NY, but after that it simply wasn’t in the system. He had to cancel his flight because he couldn’t get into the UK without his visa.
DHL (the only shipping company Apple uses, and my computer was being repaired) insists my address doesn’t exist, or that they can’t find the house. I live in a large, electric blue victorian house. You can see the smurfy gable peaks from three streets away. I told DHL this when they called me. “We’re sorry, our driver was unable to locate your residence.”
gotpasswords, next time try California Overnight. They are awesome, cheaper than the big three, and generally not morons. They pick up late (as late as 9PM sometimes), and one time the driver came back three times for an urgent shipment the factory wasn’t done yet. They only ship in-state/western Nevada though.
I just wanted to let you know that when the DHL man came into the mailroom today, it was all I could do not to laugh in his face. All because of your thread title.
Aw, man, I wish I hadn’t opened this thread. Now I have no choice but to tell you my tale of woe concerning UPS.
Last year at Christmastime they left a box containing a three-hundred dollar telescope lying on the ground at the mailbox of my sister’s place outside Lancster, PA. In the rain. Said mailbox is a half-mile from the house, along a busy highway. No, she’s not Thurston Howell’s daughter, it’s a farm. I should have learned from that, but hey, I’m an idiot.
Sent a small package from Texas to the sister’s place this year around Thanksgiving; idea was to have a few Christmas presents to open before she went to Australia for a month with her boyfriend. Sullen, Disaffected Yoof at the local UPS store mistakenly sent the package ground rather than 2-day Air as I requested; package did not arrive on the desired date, I do the on-line tracking thing, find the mistake in shipping, call up the 800 number, fight through the automated system until I get an actual person, explain the situation (package will be sitting in the open for a month if they don’t re-route it), ask for a re-route to my mother’s address in Johnstown, they say that I have to call the Lancaster office on the morning for which delivery is scheduled and do the reroute then. I do so, they promise to to return the package to their facility and send it to the substitute address.
I wait a week, check with my mother; package never showed. I check the online tracking deal again, tracker shows package delivered. To the original address. The one where no one is there for a month. I call UPS up again and calmly explain, in courteous language, just what utter dildos seem to make up their organization from top to bottom. They apologize profusely, get the Lancaster office to call me back and say they’ll go back, pick the package up and redeliver it (yeah, right) and that it will be in Johnstown two days later. I check with my mom a few days later and no, nothing ever arrived. So, maybe it’s at my sister’s place, maybe it has been stolen, maybe it was never delivered at all; who the hell knows? She gets back on the 28th, if it doesn’t turn up I guess I’ll try to file a claim, but I can hear it now: “You’re just now filing a claim for a package that was delivered in early December? What, are you kidding?”
Worthless fucking assholes. I’ll take a nitric acid enema before I send anything UPS again.
Thing is, it all depends on who happens to be running the local offices. If its some guy who just doesn’t care except about moving crap out the door, then the staff will feel it and do the same. Because it ain’t their stuff and they don’t care either. If the mnager is professional, you get pro service. C’est la vie.
I thnk I’ve seen your house. Even in San Francisco, smurfy blue gables are easy to spot. 
As for DHL vs Cal Overnight or any other carrier, there’s no option. The corporate contracts are with DHL, the mailroom guy comes around at about 3:00 to pick up outbound DHL, and it’s just the way it is. To use anything else requires explaining why you stepped out of policy and stepping out of the building to bring the item to a FedEx or UPS shop, paying out of pocket and going through the torment of expense reimbursement. :mad:
“Yellow. It’s the new brown” Well, if that yellow brown is my diarrhea from too many cheap burritos, yeah, that pretty well sums up DHL.
Why? Do you work for DHL?? (sorry, is it an injoke? I don’t get it :))
Damn!! Big whoop huh? Oh yay, money, to replace the irreplaceable? Take a hell of a lot more than merely the insurance value of that. That’s criminal incompetence (no, IANAL, I’m saying figuratively).
As we’ve seen, there are plenty of incidents with all of the carriers. DHL is probably even more of a crapshoot, since they use contractors for some of their routes (the Postal Service also uses contractors for some rural routes). Any of them are capable of screwing up badly, and multiple times over for a single package.
Our company ships about 500 packages a month. For the first three years, we used 90% Priority Mail and 10% UPS. The Postal Service handled the packages more gently in every instance but a couple. UPS was slightly more reliable in terms of delivery (about 1 in 300 Priority Mail packages would disappear, but I don’t recall ever losing a UPS package), but required us to use more expensive packaging to absorb the rough treatment.
Shipping large, delicate packages was difficult-to-impossible with the Postal Service due to some size restrictions and other things. Shipping these large, delicate packages via UPS resulted in about a 25% damaged-beyond-usability rate (sample size: 40 packages).
Based on a tip, we started trying DHL about 6 months ago. Out of 50+ large, delicate packages, 0 damage. We’ve since switched all of our shipping to DHL, and out of the 1,000 or so packages shipped thus far, 1 report of damage - even though we’re using the cheaper packaging. And we’ve had fewer complaints of misdelivered packages, too.
Granted, they do screw up in other ways (since the buyout of Airborne Express, their billing has been bizarre), but our experience thus far shows that they seem to handle packages more gently.
What a coincidence!
DHL lost my husband’s passport paperwork somewhere over the Atlantic after leaving New York. This included all the personal information you need to have on such forms, special photos that are a pain in the rear to get in the US, and more. They were coming from New York because they had to go to the main consulate to be in a special diplomatic pouch thingy.
I really hope my husband’s identity is not being used by a terrorist today…
Longtime lurker, but I finally registered just because I LOVE to tart about DHL so very much.
I had a job where things would sometimes get delivered for us via Airborne Express, and when things disappeared it would sometimes fall upon me to track them. Important stuff, like lab samples. I remember calling Airborne up once to try and locate some lab samples, and the phone monkey who handled my call just said “I guess we lost it.” That’s it. No sorry, no nothing, just we lost it, and go take more of the client’s blood, please. FedEx and UPS never lost samples.
So, that christmas, when my then-partner’s present hadn’t arrived, I called up the company I had ordered from and they said to call up DHL and ask. DHL, I say? Who are they? Just like FedEx and UPS, the person says. Okay. So I call up DHL’s 1-800 number, and the first thing I hear from the automated message is “blah blah blah recent aquisition of Airborne Express!” Oh, crap.
I ended up calling that number several times over the next few days, trying to figure out the location of my very late package. Each time I called, the tracking website said “left at door.” Each time I confronted the DHL phone person with the evidence from the tracking website, the person said “oh, the guy on the truck rang it up wrong, it’ll be there tomorrow.” Right. So finally I notice that not only does it say “left at door,” but there is a curious mishmash of letters and numbers. Then I realize that the letters just might be a misspelled half of the name of the street on which I live. And the numbers are definitely not the numbers of my house, but… maybe? So I go out the front door, and look for the numbers. Across the street, three doors down, and there is my package. This house looks abandoned and scuzzy, but the package is okay. And my address is printed perfectly on the package.
In a blind fury, I call up DHL again, and explain to them that I just found my package on someone else’s porch, three doors down across the street, and how on earth did this happen? Oh, says the quck-thinking CSR, “it looks like the driver left it with one of your neighbors!” You don’t say. This might be okay in a small town somewhere, but at the time I lived about a mile from the downtown area of a major city. It wasn’t even the suburbs. Not. Freaking. Cool. I keep calm (I don’t know how) and explain to the CSR that the address is printed right on the package for a reason. She says “the driver must not have thought it was safe to leave it at your house.” Safer to leave it at a random stranger’s house and not tell me through multiple calls? Huh? I didn’t figure it out until then because the info was screwed up and cut-off on the website, but the CSR could see everything, including my real address, including the address it was left at, and didn’t tell me.
I called up the company the item was originally purchased from and told them that their choice of delivery service was making them look like dildojuice gobblers. The poor, poor CSR said “I know, I’ve been handling calls about it all day. They lost a whole truckload of stuff.” I told her my tale, and she said it was the worst she’d heard so far.
Thus, to me DHL will always be Delivery by Hiding and Lying.
USPS - Whenever I get a package that my Disgruntled Postal Worker can’t force into my mailbox with his 6 lb. sledgehammer, I get one of those “unable to deliver” postcards claiming that no one was home to accept the delivery. Fine, except there is someone in my house 24/7. The last time it happened the DPW must have used his amazing psychic powers to determine the occupancy of my abode since there was snow on the ground and no tracks to the door.
UPS - I ordered an antique firearm from a dealer in California, which he shipped UPS. Despite the “Adult Signature Required” proviso, it was just dumped in my front yard in the rain. By the time I got home the box had basically disintegrated with the barrel sticking out the side. The rifle was well-packed in plastic so fortunately it wasn’t harmed.
When I called to bitch out UPS I asked who signed for it I was told that I did, using a form of my name I NEVER use.