I just got a package from UPS that was a bit of an adventure. They first notified me that “hey, delivery should be today!” last Thursday, but upon checking the tracking, it was still in Anchorage, Alaska. I kept an eye out just in case the tracking was way behind, but nope, didn’t arrive that day. Same notification the next day, though now it was in Louisville. It finally made it into the correct country by the end of the day, but nope, missed that ‘delivery window’ too. So that’s two ‘delivery windows’ that were physically impossible to meet by their own tracking data.
On Monday it got marked as out for delivery! Woohoo! And then soon afterwards went into “waiting for release by a non-UPS broker…” Usually that means customs, but shouldn’t you have cleared that before telling me it was out for delivery? And then a couple hours later it went into “Address is incorrect” status, when it looked perfectly fine to me. It sat there until the end of the day, when it finally went into “Address corrected, will be sent out soon”. They basically changed “1234 Fake St., unit 404” to “404 – 1234 Fake St.” You had to delay it a day because you couldn’t handle the first format? The format that Big Company would have given it to you in? Are you a shipping company or not?
I finally got the package today without further incident, though I was a bit worried since deliveries here are a bit of a crapshoot. There’s no public way into our building, not even to get to the buzzers or intercom, so what do delivery people do? I try and give them a phone number to call to let me know they’re there and I can come get it, but it’s not clear whether a company like UPS would do that or if they even had my number to call, since this was on behalf of another company. They don’t let you add one to the delivery instructions, which couldn’t be changed anyway, even to direct it to a local UPS Store instead, since the shipper locked them in. Fortunately, from my living room I could keep an eye on the arrival of vehicles and give the delivery guy a “Hey, over here!” from the balcony as he was trying to deal with the locked front door. Even though it meant spending all morning running to the window at the slightest hint of noise…(I seem to have logged about 1600 steps doing that, at least.)
Getting a package should not be this much hassle, which is why I preferred delivering to the office when possible, but with working from home…