Shrug. On July 7th, my mother only answers the phone if it’s me (because she knows I’m ok with her telling me whichever story for the Nth^n time) or her sister (because it may mean their mother is in the hospital). It’s her wedding anniversary, Dad died in '00. Bill may simply have decided it was a beautiful day to give the world the finger, which includes switching off the cellphone.
Are you getting it cross-stitched, or will it be staples?
Last night while trying to sleep I got bitten by a mosquito on my eyelid. As it happens I’m allergic to mosquitoes which means my eye is all swollen now like I got punched in the face. I took a Zyrtec but so far that isn’t helping much.
We take my Mom out for brunch every Sunday. That way we know she eats a “real” meal at least once a week. Usually, it’s Perkins or Country Kitchen or some place like that.
Yesterday Mom suggested Old Country Buffet. No problem, I said.
The gutrot kicked in around midnight. I would like to die now.
I have had in the last week two notable customer service incidents. One, which belongs in this thread triggered this email:
It’s not a life or death delivery, but good lord what a hassle.
The second occured during the outing to save my sanity on Saturday after finding out that DHL was closed on weekends. We went to see a movie and the previews cut off just before the show was scheduled to start. Rumblings started in the theatre and being already annoyed I was not feeling calm and forgiving right from the start. Then the manager came in, explained exactly what the problem was (bulb) and told us what would happen. They were going to try and fix it, if they did they would give us all a free pass for the delay. If they couldn’t fix it they would give us all a free pass and refund the money for our ticket purchase. 2 minutes of communicating and everyone knew what was happening and was happy with the outcome. They fixed it, I have 2 free passes and In Time was entertaining.
Night and day.
Dear Admin staff-
While I am flattered you believe I am super human, I cannot, in fact, see 15 patients, return 12 phone calls and check all the daily blood results for the practice within 3 hours.
I now have to come in early tomorrow and work over my lunch to finish the paperwork from this PM.
When I have blocked out slots to answer calls, or have given double slots to patients, it is because I know I need the time to deal with complicated consultations- it is not carte blanche to overbook my time.
We shall be having words tomorrow (you had all gone home by the time I locked up and left, for which you should be grateful- I was not a happy camper).
Hello, grey wrinkly mass currently residing in my skull:
I don’t mind occasional loss of a word I want to use due to something in you misfiring, causing the word to disappear from my tongue. I can tolerate the petit mal seizures that leave me sometimes looking like an idiot staring off into space, and other times sprawled out on the floor with no memory of the past few minutes. I can even live with the constant stutter that has severely affected my social life, and left me an introvert.
For the love of all that is holy and unholy, do you have to inflict me with migraines so strong that I lose part of my vision? My one great passion is reading, and to take that away from me is horrible. I’d rather be deaf that not be able to read.
I swear if I didn’t need you to live I’d remove you with an ice cream scoop and give you to a couple of drunken hicks to play football with.
Oh I heard you on crazy service from DHL! I used to work for a company whose parent company had a contract with DHL. We had contract workers who were paid via check, typically sent to a job site. Occasionally, we would have to send one to a residence. Apparently, DHL’s overnight service doesn’t include rural Tennessee! While I would understand a delay of a day or two, they eventually “contracted delivery” with an “approved vendor” who ended up putting the DHL envelope in a regular manila envelope and sending it through the USPS. The “overnight” delivery took a week. We reamed them up one side and down the other for that cluster-fuck.
Doesn’t include my part of GA either, and I live 60 minutes from Atlanta, and 15 from Athens, which is home of one of GA’s major colleges. Anytime I get something that DHL was supposed to deliver, it winds up being handed off to USPS.
Dear Driver of Large Van:
I parked out here because there was space. Lots of it. Both sides of me and in rows in front of and behind me, too.
So why, pray tell, did you park your van so close to my car that even **Twiggy **wouldn’t be able to fit between the two vehicles? I wouldn’t have cared if you’d done that on the passenger side, but you did it on the driver’s side, meaning I had to climb over the center console and shift lever to get into the seat. I’m not really built for that anymore.
You’re lucky all I did was leave a note.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that this is pretty common to all the overnight/express carriers. For destinations that aren’t in fairly populated/central areas, they hand off to the USPS. So carriers like FedEx and DHL get loads of money to transfer items between highly populated areas, and USPS gets to spend more than they get from those carriers to carry those packages “the last mile”.
It’s no wonder the USPS is having money problems.
I’m so glad FedEx and UPS don’t do this as well in my area then. The post office has a bad habit of leaving packages that won’t fit in the mail box sitting under the mail box here, which leads to packages getting stolen.
Educate me, please, on that USPS spends more than they get detail on “the last mile” thing.
No kidding. Not to mention my USPS carrier’s habit of dropping one of those postcards into the box claiming no one was home to sign for a delivery! She did this last week, on a day when my husband and I were both home. Naturally, it was a book that my niece needed ASAP. I went with her to pick it up, and registered a complaint. Not that I expect it to do any good…
Fortunately, most of our packages come via UPS, and the driver is a cutie. Plus, my neighborhood is filled with Mrs. Kravitz wannabes, so theft from the front door would be reported immediately… even if loudly barking dogs didn’t scare off the miscreant. (Which happened a couple of weeks ago: dude nonchalantly wheels about halfway down the drive on his bike… up to no good, obviously, because he turned tail as soon as the K9 heard someone and started raising Cain. I was actually a little disappointed that I didn’t get to greet him… judging by appearances, he assumed no one was home because he couldn’t see a car from the street. However, I was out on the back porch with the big dog, and he’d have seen both of us as soon as he made it past the carport … :D)
Oh, I’m not mad at him, I was just venting. One of our “rules” is that if we don’t feel like answering a call for any reason, we don’t answer and we don’t get upset about not getting an answer.
I didn’t ask. I don’t want to know. I know I should have gotten every detail, but I’ve actually been in denial. Its like…OK, this is going to happen, so I have to plan for it, but I don’t really need to actually* think *about it. It really only got real to me last week.
The nice part is that my doctor wants me to spend most of my recovery laying on the couch, with my feet propped up on the arm. Tony will have to do almost everything for me. *sniffs air noticing that some kitty just used the litterbox. calls Tony to come over and scoop. Doctor’s orders afterall. 
Bear with me, please. I’m working on a dim memory of something I read a few years ago about reasons why the USPS is having money issues.
The gist of it is that the USPS is legally obligated to deliver to every single address in the U.S., whereas carriers like UPS, FedEx, and DHL aren’t.
In low-population density areas, these carriers often hand off packages to USPS for delivery because the post office has to go there anyway and it’s cheaper for UPS, etc., to pay the USPS to do the delivery than it is to run a truck out to a location that may not be anywhere near anything else they’re delivering.
Meantime, the USPS gets a (relatively) small fee for carrying this package to the remote location and loses out on the larger fee for carrying it cross-country. Why is this a problem? Because delivering in high-density areas subsidizes delivering in low-density areas, and the USPS is losing delivery to high-density areas to the express carriers, who can afford to charge less for package delivery because they aren’t having to subsidize delivery to low-density areas.
It’s sort of the same reason why rural areas are the last to get paved roads, electricity, and phone service. The costs to provide those services is higher than the fees that can be earned from providing them, so those costs are partially paid for by the fees charged to the people who get them for a lower cost.
I hope that makes sense. I’ve had a day that turned my brain to tapioca, so I’m not sure how clearly I’m explaining. I wish I could provide a credible cite, but so far all I’ve turned up that even remotely sounds like what I remember reading is a comment by a retired postal worker on a Talking Points memo (thanks, Google), but this is (a) way too recent to be what I remembered, (b) an unlikely thing for me to have read since I rarely if ever read Talking Points, and (c) supplies no numbers.
If you want, I can keep digging, but as I said, this was something I read a few years back. No idea if I can find it again.
Is there anything that UPS or FedEx will deliver for $.47?
Morgyn, I have heard the same thing. It does make sense.
I get UPS deliveries, but everything else comes by USPS. I used to pay for fast shipping with other services, but when I saw that it had been handed off, I would start the complaint process. I always got my fast shipping charges refunded, but it was such a pain that now I always pick the cheapest shipping option and figure it will be at least 2 weeks.
I believe that the USPS has a monopoly on first class mail delivery, if that’s what you mean.
And I have no idea if UPS or FedEx will or can deliver anything for that little, but I doubt it. I don’t think USPS could deliver a package for that little, either. 
[And, of course, the USPS is finding it impossible to deliver first class mail for that price, too, due to a variety of reasons.]
What I’m saying is that when I send an overnight, it’s over $10. If FedEx/UPS can’t do an overnight, then the website refuses the service. If I’m sending a ground package, then the cheapest bidder wins… which may or may not be USPS.
They do. I know that all government mail outs MUST be sent by USPS. The USPS documentation for registered letters trumps everything else in the legal systems. 5 bucks to have someone go to a crack house 3 times for a signature…no wonder the USPS is going broke.