UPS - A Rant

I am not happy.

In fact, I’m really quite annoyed.

With all of these walking trips that we’re taking we’re really putting ourselves up against the stops to get work on my late mother’s house finished. We really need to have it finished before we go off to Scotland in a couple of weeks’ time, and if we stand any chance of achieving that we need to be working on it every day, and not sitting around at home.

Anyone who pays an unusual amount of attention to this Blog and who has an uncommonly good memory may recall that I’ve had something of an issue with my Steripen letting me down at critical times (there is a link between those two paragraphs, bear with me here – I’m ranting and rants don’t always follow a logical order).

Thanks to a comment that someone left in response to one of my whinges about the device, I got in touch with the Steripen people in the USA a few weeks ago and they told me to send the device back to them, reassuring me that their warranty is for life, not just for the first 12 months as I had expected (most of my disgruntledness was because the water-getting-in fault had developed when it was over a year old and thus although it hadn’t been much used, I didn’t think that it was within warranty).

I duly sent it back and then I sat back to wait. Actually, I didn’t sit back, but rather I went away walking for a couple of weeks.

I got back on Tuesday night to find that I had missed three attempted deliveries from UPS. The sender was Hydrophoton thus it was either my old Steripen back with a ‘not a warranty defect’ sort of a note (now that really would have me ranting!) or a new Steripen (the email exchange had indicated that it wouldn’t be repairable, so it would be replaced).

The problem was that having tried to deliver three times within the space of three days, the final note told me that I had five days to go and collect the parcel from the UPS depot 30 miles up the road. It seemed that UPS’s systems don’t allow for people to go away for a few days.

I got on the phone smartish to make sure that the parcel wasn’t returned to the States, and to my surprise there was no debate required to get a further delivery date arranged. It was due to be delivered today between noon and 5pm.

I duly abandoned work on the house in Wolverhampton and came home for the day.

Alas, there was no knock on the door today within the allocated time slot, so I called UPS again. They did indeed have the record of my phone call arranging to have the parcel redelivered today. What they couldn’t explain was why there was a further note on their tracking system (nor could they say who had made the note), timed at 5am on Wednesday morning, saying that delivery had failed and that I would go and collect it.

Now, as it happens, I was at home at 5am on Wednesday morning and I can say with some certainty that no-one tried to deliver anything. I’m also pretty sure that I didn’t phone them at 5am to tell them not to deliver today after all, but that I would collect the parcel myself.

So, rather than spending today doing something valuable and useful, I have completely wasted my time* waiting for a knock on the door from UPS that it turns out was never going to come.

Even worse, Mick took the opportunity to pop up to his Mum’s – and in the process of doing that passed pretty close to the UPS depot. If they had thought to inform me that they had randomly decided that I would collect the parcel, he easily could have done that today.

Grrrrr.

(*Actually the day wasn’t completely wasted; I did take the opportunity of having an internet connection to catch up on lots of other Blogs, to write up some notes on our C2C walk and to order some new kit to replace stuff that has worn out or been lost (alas none of the latter is exciting new kit because all of it is same-make-and-model replacement)).