United Parcel Service can die

The BBQ Pit
1

So I bought a rather high-end laptop from a seller on eBay about a month ago. Brand new in box, saved a lot of cash. Good seller, and he ships via UPS. As with any high-value item, I track the shipment online and check up on it each day to see its progress. The day of delivery comes around and it’s indicated as “Out For Delivery” on the system, meaning it’s on the delivery truck and on its way. A few hours go by. It starts getting dark. UPS doesn’t usually take this long but since they deliver up til 7:00, I figure I’ll wait.

Package never arrives. Never gets past “Out For Delivery” status. With my patience rapidly eroding, I drive to the UPS facility (which is, of course, not too far away) at about 9:00 and get to deal with the shitheads at the front security office who don’t get paid to give a fuck about anything, much less customer relations. I get to their Will Call station up front, but it’s pretty clear they don’t give a damn either, since it’s closing time and all.

“Well the system says the package is out for delivery, sir.”
“Yes, I know what the system says, I know how to use a website too, and since you don’t deliver past 7:00 and I’m here now at 9:00, perhaps you can tell me where it is and why it takes over twelve hours to deliver a package to an address that’s less than three miles away.”

I essentially get a response that suggests it’s possible the driver was unable to get to that part of his route today, and to wait another day for the next route. I guess it’s a possibility, but it’s never happened before, and is especially interesting since during the day, I have a view of the street in front of the office where the delivery truck would’ve driven down to deliver the package, and I saw no less than three UPS trucks drive down it throughout the day. So, basically an “it’s not my job” answer. Can’t call the driver, can’t contact dispatch, can’t do anything except tell you what you can already find out yourself by going to the UPS website.

Another day goes by, and imagine that … no package arrives. I tell the seller the whole story and after a few days, a “trace request” is started, which is essentially UPS terminology for someone getting paid more than $7 an hour (over the course of a week) to tell me that the package is officially lost, in much the same way a coroner has to come to the scene of a disembowled corpse before the person can be declared dead. Two weeks go by and the seller still claims that paperwork from UPS is “pending”. He has flawless feedback and has kept me in the loop, so I can’t fault him. I know he’s probably the victim of just as much incomprehensible UPS stupidity on his end as I was on mine.

One month later, here I am, out $2,400 and still no laptop, and still waiting for the seller to clear up his “paperwork” with the shitheads at UPS to get his money back so he can ship me another one. I hope the guy at UPS who decided to keep my laptop for himself is enjoying it whilst I get to wait for the mouth breathers in corporate to pay the seller’s claim for it.

Fuck you, UPS. This isn’t the first time you’ve lost a package of mine, but it will be the last. I know it won’t make a difference to you since you deliver millions of packages a day (except mine, it seems) … but I will never, ever in my life give you a single goddamn cent to do anything for me. Your slogan is about as asinine as your customer service. “What can Brown do for you?” Absolutely nothing. I’ll go to FedEx, DHL, and the post office when I need something couriered, because, you know, they actually do it.

2

That honestly sounds like the seller’s problem, not yours. You should be able to get your money back any time you want. If the seller doesn’t cooperate, your credit card company will.

3

Yes, I know it’s the seller’s problem. Yes, he will take care of it. Yes, I know I can go to my credit card company were he not to.

The point is that after a month, I still don’t have my item, and I have UPS to thank. Again.

4

Funny, in another thread, people were saying that if you really must get something, don’t rely on the USPS. Pay extra for quality shipping. Like UPS. Your OP pretty much puts the lie to that, don’t it?

The thing is, when they’re good, they’re OK, sort of. When they fuck up, they fuck up big time, and they can’t fix it. I’m suspecting you will never see that laptop. Ever.

5

I understand blaming UPS for your item getting lost, since they were the ones that lost it. I understand pitting them. From what you wrote though, it sounds like the fault for you not having a laptop or your money back after a month lies with the seller.

6

But I think the point was that you shouldn’t have to wait for the seller to get paid by UPS. If he has another laptop to send you, he should send it now. Why should you have to wait? Shipping is his problem, not yours.

On preview, what RogueRacer said.

7

I don’t doubt I’ll never see the original item. I told the seller that when this is all resolved to ship the replacement via FedEx, and he happily agreed. This should be happening any day now. He’s shown every sign of being cooperative and I’ve even called UPS to followup on my end. We are both waiting for responses. UPS is a complete waste of both our time, and this is nothing new. As I’ve indicated, this isn’t the first time something got lost somewhere between the stage of getting loaded onto the truck and ending up in my hands, and it’s taking even longer than it has in the past to resolve.

As far as USPS goes, I’ve never lost anything with them … but then, there aren’t a bunch of lower-class, unscrupulous, thieving jackasses working at my post office. This obviously isn’t the case at my UPS branch.

8

I friend of mine pronounces UPS as “oops!”

9

That’s a pretty harsh term for them, and you’re painting them with a pretty broad brush. On the other hand, it’s a pretty accurate description of nearly every UPS driver I’ve encountered.

10

I’m split. For every time I’ve had an experience with UPS like the OP, there has also been a time when a driver has stayed late on a route to get me a package that had to be signed for, or something similar. As individuals, they are spotty, just like any other organization. As an organization, however, they suck diseased donkey-balls.

11

and

Whoa, whoa, whoa. UPS isn’t perfect - and neither is FedEx, but lets be honest. The USPS sucks. I’ve been fucked by the USPS so many times that if it ever dissolved, I expect to get half its stuff.

There’s a reason that competitors rose up against the USPS - namely, they are freaking incompetent. Having used both UPS and FedEx extensively - I can tell you this, I’d rather use FedEx, then I’d rather use UPS, then I’d rather use DHL, and I’d NEVER use the USPS. And if someone’s going to lose something, I’d rather it was UPS than the USPS, that’s for damn sure.

As for the doofus driver bit - I’m not privy to UPS’s inner workings - but most FedEx drivers are independent contractors who own their own truck and the rights to their route. They have pretty strong financial incentives to get things there on time and keep their customers happy. The people who work for minimum wage at the distribution centers? Not so much.

12

That is the correct way to pronounce it. We have been saying it that way for at least 15 years.

On the other hand my current UPS driver is very good. He ensures the packages go on the front porch as does the Fedex driver. USPS leaves my packages on the ground in front of the garage door, on the garbage cans and other strange places. They do not even try. They deliver stuff to the wrong house and then take 7 days to straighten it out. USPS is the worst delivery method in my opinion. Fedex is the best.

UPS at my old house was a disaster. The packages were bent, mangled, mis-delivered or lost. In other words, just as bad as USPS.

anamnesis, it stinks that you got caught up in a UPS red tape knot. They should not take so long.

Jim

13

Hey, now. My stepdad is a UPS driver, and he would never dream of stealing anything from his truck, or intentionally shirking his duties by “forgetting” to deliver a package. He’s a man of morals.

He is also, however, rather stupid…and from what I’ve seen of his cohorts, he’s one of the best and brightest they’ve got. I don’t have any trouble picturing him totally spacing a piece of his route; his coworkers likely routinely forget what all those boxes in the back are for, or the fact that they even have jobs in the first place.

Still, let’s not malign their characters. Hanlon’s Razor and all.

14

I guess it comes down to personal experience. I’ve never been fucked by the USPS, but UPS once gave me such a thorough rogering that I tell the tale to this day. It got to the point where every day I would call and ask to yell at a manager.

15

Maybe you’re right that it comes down to personal experience. I, for one, would never yell at a Postal worker because I’d be scared they’d shoot me. :stuck_out_tongue:

16

Sorry, didn’t mean to dis your pop.

It’s just that whenever I think of UPS guys, this one in particular springs to mind. I knew him when I worked in a mail room, so I saw him every day. He was actually a great guy, but he – how shall I put it? – “lacked decorum.” He could make a sailor blush.

17

That’s exactly why they’ll be getting virtually all of my future business.

It’s pretty clear your uncle at least cares about his job, and as I said in my OP, I can see how it’s possible to forget part of a route or a package in the back of the truck. This package wasn’t forgotten. If it had, it would’ve arrived later rather than vanishing into thin air as UPS might have me believe. Exactly how does a package go missing? What, it falls off the back of the truck? Assuming it were lost in the back corner of the cargo area, I wouldn’t count that as a possibility. The last two people to touch the package are someone who puts it on the truck, and someone who takes it off the truck. It has to be scanned at every stage so that the system knows where it is and when it was there. There’s no big mystery. You can tell where it went missing, so it’s pretty obvious who’s responsible for its disappearance. That’s part of the beauty of the tracking system. While I believe the precept of Hanlon’s Razor is probably true quite often, a laptop is small, expensive, easy to identify and not very hard to “conveniently misplace”, so what reason is there to not label this as a case of outright theft?

More importantly in my mind, what are the chances these UPS employees probably didn’t receive any disciplinary action at all over a $2,500 insurance claim?

18

Yeah, but the reason you’d be scared is partly because they’d actually show up to the shooting. :smiley:

19

What, in every single case? Me not know. But I can tell you what happened in one case.

It was delivered to the wrong address. To a football stadium over 30 miles away. And OOPS’s records indicated that it had been delivered, so nothing could be done with it. It was farther away than I could get to. And all the while, OOPS told me it was in their distribution center, some 30 miles in the opposite direction. They would say – in one breath, mind you – that it was in both locations simultaneously.

It would still be there to this day, had it not been wrongly delivered to the office of someone who just so happened to live 3 doors down from me.

20

Me too. (Or we, too.) I thought everybody did.