God bless my next-door neighbors: kind, trustworthy, and at home virtually 24/7.
He has a degenerative disease, and she took early retirement to care for him. I do some incidental errand running for them and in return they let me use their address for all my deliveries. Never had a problem with a single package.
(I bet you’re all green with envy.)
An update:
About 2 hours after I called the corporate MM, I get a call from the supervisor at the Franklin Park, Illinois office saying “I just got a call from the main office saying that one of my drivers messed up a delivery to you. I called the driver who delivers to your area, he doesn’t have it. And from what I can tell the package in question is still in Detroit.”
At this point I was beyond yelling.
I calmly explained to the guy that the main office was in error calling you. I thanked him for his call, told him not to worry, the problem didn’t lie with his office, but took his name and phone number for good measure.
I called another corporate masturbating monkey and explained the error of the previous corporate masturbating monkey, who called the IL office. She apologized, and as it turns out, she may not have actually been a masturbating monkey at all.
Within 20 minutes, I got a call from the MM from the Detroit office, the one I reamed out last night and who assured me the package would be in my hands Saturday morning.
“Hi. We talked last night,” he said. “Was there anything that I said in our previous conversation that would lead to you to believe the package wouldn’t be in your hands tomorrow?”
“No, in fact I went to bed last night very satisfied with how things had turned out,” I told him. “But this morning, I got a call from a woman in your office who told me that I would not be getting this package for 2-3 business days. And as you can imagine, my blood pressue shot up.”
“Oh man!” he cried. “She should not have called you. This matter was taken care of. She should’ve known better. I am so sorry!”
“Huh,” I said.
“Your package is in my hands right now, and is going to be on a plane to Chicago tonight. You’ll have it tomorrow.”
I got his name, thanked him for calling me back, and said have a good day.
So now I reeeeeeeeeeeeeally hope my story has a happy ending tomorrow. I still plan on writing a letter to a honcho. I mean, I had 17 phone conversations with 13 people at UPS in 20 hours, fercryinoutloud.
And I’ll never go Brown again for as long as I live. And I’m making sure my friends, family and employer only use the USPS to send me stuff from now on, too.
Happy, more than before anyway
I was moving from the west coast to the east coast and, not having any furniture at the time and being pretty poor, sent my stuff UPS. Well, when the boxes arrived, I got about 8 of the 11 I’d sent and they looked like that Sampsonite Ape had taken a few minutes with them. The one I sent my computer in had a hole in it. My desktop’s metal frame was bent. And UPS wouldn’t renumerate me for it, despite the fact that I’d paid for the insurance. They cited some packaging requirements, despite I’d worked at a store where we sent stuff out UPS for customers and we’d never heard of it. I boycotted UPS for years, but now apathy has taken over…
Mild Rant:
I had a package (needless to say, important) coming in from Canada, it showed up with a $49 COD charge. We are a satellite location and can’t cut checks. Called the vendor, nope, they didn’t send it COD.
Called UPS, got told the charge was for duties & brokerage. Fine, sez I, just change that charge from COD and bill our account. Got put on hold about five times by the guy trying to handle this, I thought fairly simple, request. Got told, basically, “No problem, our brokerage people will call you back in under one hour”.
Never heard from the brokerage people, but just assumed (I know…) that they would be able to handle this. Nope, they made two more COD delivery attempts and then were in the process of shipping the package back to Canada.
Called again, was told “Nope, there is no COD charge for this package, it was changed as you requested. I don’t know why the driver didn’t leave it.” She promised she would call the local depot and have the driver re-deliver.
The manager of the local depot called to basically tell me that the first two people didn’t know what they were talking about, there was no way in the world to change that package from COD. He did hold the package for me until I could get a check from corporate.
I don’t know, I guess I’ve had so few problems over the years that this hasn’t really soured me. It does seem like they have a large number of people that don’t know what they are talking about, though.
I don’t have much sympathy… you should have tried your best to be there for the delivery since it was “urgent”. I know… life happens and humans make mistakes but it’s not all UPS’ fault.
UPS might be bad, but DHL is much worse. The last place I worked used DHL for outgoing packages, but they fucked up deliveries so consistently that the company cancelled the account.
I’ve had similiar problems with UPS before. My solution: after you miss the first devliery attempt, call the number on the slip and ask them to hold the package for you.
Then go pick it up at the distribution center the next afternoon.
No, actually it was in the back. He went to get it right after I laid off him. I know it wasn’t his fault. I just hope I get my hands on the guy who thinks a single-family house needs an apartment number.
I used to work for UPS. The people working there are for the most part good people…the management is a bunch of idiots.
I was a sorter in the Air shipping department. My job was to take the packages being offloaded from the trucks and sort them to the various destination trucks, who each had a person who would take the packages off the belt, and another person who would stack the boxes neatly in the truck.
The Air department was seperate from the rest of the building. Packages that were supposed to be Next and Second day air that got accidentally offloaded to the rest of the building were delived by cart after the shift started to slow down. This was fine, the delay gave us time to get the majority of our own sort out of the way. When you are personally sorting up to 3000 packages an hour, any lessening of the flow is welcome. After 7:30 or so things would slow down and we’d get the cart deliveries.
Things were going smoothly, until some idiot decided to add a new belt between the rest of the building and my department.
And didn’t include an off switch.
And had the two belts come together in a Y 20 feet in the air away from me.
Suddenly my job became a super hell. the intersection of the belts would constantly jam. No longer was there a delay for the missorted packages, and even worse, now that there was a whole belt devoted to the missort, they stopped being so carefull about not having any. Packages would get stuck and burst. I’d have to stop ( I could stop my own belt) my belt and climb up and unjam the belts. Since I wasn’t allowed to climb up on the belts, they gave me a log metal pole to try and unjam the packages.
This only destroyed more packages. We lost at least 20 a night, totally destroyed.
So I’d climb up the stupid belt 30 times a day to fix the jam and try to save people’s packages, even though being cought could mean that I might get fired. Sometimes our belt would be stopped because of a truck change or something, and the new belt would just keep chugging on, piling on packages until they would spill over onto the floor.
Since my belt was no longer flowing smoothly, and the packages were still being unloaded from the trucks, I’d now have huge unmanageable piles of packages to try and sort. 3000 packages at peak time is just barely manageable if the boxes aren’t stacked upon each other 5 deep. And once you get behind and lose the flow, you are screwed for the rest of the night.
This entirely intolerable situation lasted for almost a month before they finally gave me a control for the new belt.
My first response was to just turn the damn thing off until the flow in our section slowed down to something reasonable. But they complained and told me not to do that, so I tried to let it flow a bit during temporary lulls. It was a pain to manage 2 belts at once, but at least jams were far less common.
So what did they do once I had finally gotten the situation back to something manageable?
Why- fuck it up again of course! Only took them a week too.
This time the stupidity came down from higher in the organization. They developed these new scanner labels that contained more information than the old barcode ones. Also at the same time, they started tracking packages by what truck they went into. Before, they would be scanned by seperate people with hand-held scanners, the only information was that the package was received into that hub. Now they added new scanners in front of each truck, and you could tell that a package was in such-and-such truck on it’s way to what-ever airport.
The problem with this is that the same people who would offload my sorted packages from the belt into the trucks would now also have to scan them at the same time. They installed these new over-door scanners for this purpose. Normally, the truck loader would just have to double-check my sort, grab 3-4 boxes at once, and walk over to the rollers on the truck, where the stacker in the truck would play tetris with them. It was a smoothly operating system. Now suddenly there is a major monkey wrench thrown into the whole thing. The loader can only grab one or two( side by side) packages at a time. This means that he suddenly can no longer keep up with the flow. This means that the belt is constantly stopping. But the people unloading trucks at the other end of the line can’t stop. They have to empty the trucks and get them out of there in an efficient manner. Suddenly I’m back to a belt piled 5 packages deep, nearely impossible to sort. I have to try to move the new belt, but I can’t because mine isn’t moving. I get to play games where I move each belt a little bit to try and keep things moving. I give up and walk out after a month and a failed promise to have someone help me manage the mess.
So—uh, just feel lucky that your package didn’t explode in some big belt jam brought upon by idiot managers.