Gently place? I don’t think anybody would expect them to gently place anything, but treating your TVs as shotputs and long items as javelins is hardly reasonable either.
Yep. Deliberate carelessness at his job is his employer’s problem. Deliberate shit-for-shit’s sake posting here is our problem. Opinions about brickbacon’s work ethic aside, AFAIK he hasn’t posted just to rile people up. It’s a bit scary, but he seems completely sincere, not to mention self-righteous, about mishandling packages just because he wants to.
Offensive opinions? Fine. Flame at will. Posting offensive crap just to torque off posters? Not fine.
There is a difference.
Veb
Ha! Be glad it was only suitcases you saw being tossed. A friend of mine wrote a complaint letter to an airline (I know because she had me proofread it) about how she sat on the plane and watched as the baggage handlers tossed, UPSIDEDOWN, a box that was very clearly marked (obviously, as it could be read from the inside the plane)
FRAGILE, HANDLE WITH CARE.
LIVE, TROPICAL FISH.
^ THIS SIDE UP ^
I’m a fan of the concept of shipping insurance. So far as I can figure out, what that basically means is you’re paying postage for them to tell you that they will ship your package to destination X. If you want them to actually guarantee that it will get there in one piece (or hell, even get there at all), it costs extra.
Yeah yeah, I get it, risk management, some goods are extremely costly and they should not be required to insure that loss, etc. Nonetheless, as they are not even held to a negligence standard (to my knowledge) in showing that the loss was not their fault if you didn’t buy insurance, it is an interesting commentary.
You are correct that they shouldn’t be, but the reality is that they most likely will be. Dispite brickbacon’s attitude, most of my co-workers (when I was on the bottom of the dock food chain) actually didn’t intentionally go around shot-putting TVs, but a lot of throwing was involved in hand-loading. (I was at Ripoff Parcel Service also.) For those who haven’t done dockwork, if you handload 500 boxes and the stacker caught 490 of them, that was pretty good. The amount it would cost to replace those 10, if they were damaged, was more then made up for in the man-hours saved by loading that way. The assnugget depicted in the OP was a jerk who probably has a mad on at his job…totally inexcusable ,IMHO, to let that affect his work ethic.
My$.02, DESK
Hellooo, Newman.
If there’s anything more unattractive than brickbacon’s wanton destruction of property, it’s the self-righteous “I pay your salary” whine.
You know, I’m not exactly saying brickbacon needs to kiss my ass because I “pay his salary”. All I’m asking for is that he not deliberately destroy my stuff because I hired him (through his company) to do some work for me.
It may or may not be attractive, but it’s accurate. brickbacon is being paid to do a job, and should do it to the best of his ability.
I’m not saying you’re factually incorrect. And i tend to agree with your overall position.
Maybe i’m being unfair to you, but that particular phrase really grates on me. As i said in another thread recently, in my experience a person whose first resort is to the “I pay your salary” argument is often “a selfish fool who can’t look past his or her own self-interest in any given situation.” It’s one of those phrases that, for me, immediately indicates “asshole.” whether or not the person’s argument actually has any merit.
That’s true, the phrase is usually accompanied by some unreasonable request by a customer. I just couldn’t come up with a better way to state my feelings on it.
When did I say it was right? It is what it is.
You’re right, you’re not a lawyer. Stick to being a joyless prick, you are better at that.
I never said it was OK. To be honest, I usually don’t work in the area where packages are loaded anymore. It’s not me doing it (not that it really matters). Your argument that you pay part of my salary is bullshit. You pay the shipping company, they pay me. You have nothing to do with my me, or my salary. That’s a hollow argument.
Another whining asshole. It’s common knowledge that this happens, deal with it.
This is really funny.
I think all of you missed the point I was making. I was trying to give some people insight as to why they see delivery men treat their packages like shit. I know it’s wrong, they know it’s wrong, but handling the boxes the way they should be handled takes too much time and energy. Especially when it’s 95 degrees outside and you want to go home.
Say what you will, but our warehouse has an impeccable record, and our packages arrive intact far more than most other companies. If we didn’t, they would have closed the place. It really boils down to a cost-benefit analysis. Most people aren’t deliberately trying to destroy people’s stuff, they just don’t take the time to do the right thing.
If we do not pay your company to do a job for us, where precisely do you think that money that they use to pay you will come from?
Just curious.
I don’t think anyone is asking for white glove treatment. Just don’t treat your customers like a guy who kicked your dog.
Toss our packages to save time, stack them in whatever order is convenient, that’s cool, that’s how you keep prices down. Kicking a box to see if it breaks, or roughing it up because it’s “liberating”? Come on. We paid you to take our packages safely from place to place, and you deliberately destroy them. It’s just not cool, and no level of explanation will make it ok.
If you stopped using our services, it wouldn’t affect anyone in the slightest. Of course the money the company makes comes from customers, but the same is true for everyone. The argument that you pay someone’s salary because you use a service that pays them is bogus. You would be paying everyone’s salary under that logic.
I was partially joking when I said it was liberating. I wouldn’t have a job if I deliberately destroyed packages.
To a large extent, that logic is good. By myself, no, your company won’t notice. The next person that goes to a different company, no, they won’t notice that either. The 100th, or the 1000th, or the 10,000th - at some point it’s going to be noticed.
I’ve never understood your attitude, and frankly, when I was a retail manager, employees with your attitude drove me batshit insane. Just because a customer’s money is filtered through your employer does not mean that the customer is not the source of your paycheck.
Not that I support kicking boxes or other extreme behaivor, the onus to provide good service is on the company, not on the peons. The company has full control of who they hire, how they attract and retain their employees, and when they fire them. If a company thinks it is profitable to provide good service and not to hire jackasses, they will do it. If not, they arn’t going to spend the money out of the goodness of their hearts.
There is a rediculous amount of misinformation in this thread concerning delivery companies. To be fair, there are also a few well-reasoned arguments.
I have spent many years in management at FedEx. I’ve spent the last several years as a contracted delivery driver for FedEx. I’ve also thought about starting an “Ask the Fedex Driver” thread to combat ignorance, but it would probably end up in the Pit anyway.
It boils down to being pragmatic; if you want your package to arrive in mint condition, overpack it. Then pack it some more. Then put that package in an overpacked package.
We’ll never purposely abuse a package, but it is a long hard ride…
Well, how would you describe the behavior recounted in the OP?
Literally throwing boxes out of the truck may be ostensibly designed merely to save you some time in your busy day, but the fact is that the driver must know that this is likely to lead to breakage, and yet does it anyway. That sounds like purposely abusing a package to me.
Forgot to add:
And it especially sounds like intentional abuse of a package if said package has “Fragile” written in big letters on the side, as in the case of the OP.
Now, in my experience, people generally only place the word “Fragile” on packages that actually contain fragile goods. I’ve never, for example, placed the word on a box containing books or clothing or documents.
If you see the word “Fragile” on the side of the box, it’s understandable that you don’t have time to treat it with kid gloves, but the least you could do is not launch the fucking thing out of your truck onto the pavement.