What has brown done to you?
Posted on October 30, 2003 @ 2:26 pm
Not to steal teedz’s thunder, but UPS is beginning to drive me nuts. Sure, I’ve had the typical delivery problems that most customers face: i.e. the UPS guy tries to deliver a package on Monday at 2:30 and I’m not there to sign for it, so he takes it back to the warehouse. On Tuesday, he tries to deliver it again at 2:30, but to no avail. Now, even given the empirical reality that I wasn’t at home at 2:30 on either of the previous days, the UPS guy fails to discern the pattern and deduce that I might have some kind of mid-afternoon obligation during the week (gasp!) and, as such, attempts to drop it off again on Wednesday at 2:30. Since it’s the third attempt and I’m not there to sign for it, the package goes back to the nearest UPS warehouse, leaving me with no option but to pick it up on my own time–during business hours, of course.
Now, I could live with that kind of frustration. My more recent UPS problems, however, run much deeper than that. My wife has lived in our current house for the past year and a half. I moved in after we got married about six months ago. During that eighteen-month span, I would estimate that we’ve had roughly fifteen packages fail to reach us, including one just yesterday. In many cases, my wife and I have paid shipping twice when our packages were returned to their respective senders. The problem? Apparently, the UPS person has been delivering our packages to the apartment complex next door to our house for lo these many months. On each occasion, the person working the front desk at the neighboring apartment complex would point out to the UPS delivery person that the package didn’t specify an apartment number in the address (not surprising since it wasn’t being sent to an apartment), and UPS would thus declare that the package had an “insufficient address” for delivery and return it to its sender.
After the first couple of failed deliveries, my wife and I began to notice the emerging pattern. So, we called the local UPS office and explained the whole situation. Their defense? Apparently, since we live at 2025 Evergreen Terrace and the apartment complex next door is at 2035 Evergreen Terrace, it’s easy for the delivery person to get confused and deliver our packages to the wrong place. Call me crazy, but isn’t that how all streets work? Also, isn’t being able to discern between addresses–no matter how similar they may appear–the very essence of a UPS delivery person’s job? Somehow, FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service seem to be able to figure it out. Would it be easier if the streets were numbered non-consecutively? On a few occasions, we’ve even asked the sender to specify on the mailing label “2025 Evergreen Terrace (the brick house, not the apartment complex),” but that wasn’t enough to counteract the simple reality that the numbers 2025 and 2035 are apparently utterly indistinguishable from one another–even to the trained eye.
Anyway, after that first call, the manager of the local UPS office promised to talk to his drivers and fix the situation. That was about a year ago, and our problems persist to this day with every single package that’s sent to us via UPS–including the cell phone battery that we were expecting earlier this week. Each time it happens, we call UPS and they assure us that it won’t happen again.
What can brown do for me? They can cram it with walnuts. (Ugly.)*
*TM and ©: Homer J. Simpson
Posted by Jess | Filed Under Random Musings |
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Oops! I nearly forgot to mention that I’m shamelessly siphoning traffic from Electric Venom with this post.
“My life got pretty crap-tastic after I plugged into the big brown machine”
You can set it up though UPS so that you no longer have to sign for packages. That is what we do at my office, and saves us a lot of hassle. We put a rubbermaid thing in the back and just told them to put everything in there so we hardly ever see the guy.
a few months ago a good friend of mine was waiting for a car part to be delivered via the brown clowns. tracking the delivery online, ups approximated delivery at 3:25 in the afternoon. we waited. we waited some more. then, out of the corner of my eye, i saw the UPS van driving away and around the corner. my friend lives in a clusterfuck of apartments with a park in the middle so we could see the ups van park right around the corner and attempt delivery of someone else’s package. so we call ups and bitch and they call the guy on his little dispatch radio. the guy insists he rang the doorbell (which he did not, my friend has a rather loud and obnoxious doorbell) and left a note when no one answered. sure enough there it was, package not delivered because recipient not home. so we run and get the delivery guy, threatening undue testicle smashing if we did not get said package. brown clown pleads for wellbeing of testicles saying that he didn’t have time to wait for us to answer door, so he wrote out sticker ahead of time so he could catch up on his delivery schedule…argh…(sorry for overlong post)
I had Best Buy do the same thing to me. They were supposed to deliver a washer and dryer between 12 and 2 or something like that. I got home from work at 11:55 to await delivery, and the truck is pulling away from my house. The note on the door is marked 12:15. I got in my car, chased them down, cussed them out and they came back to deliver it. (Note that this was the third time the had botched the delivery).
So while Best Buy is a great store for selection, I will never buy any high dollar item there again.
Hunting The Snark - Week 12
The Hunt has reached puberty, which means that if you thought you’d seen snippy Snarkage, be warned: it only gets pissier from here. So, in celebration of this milestone, I present the pubescent, puerile link plethora known as the Hunting of the Snark….
funny how everyone thinks the UPS guys is thier personal delivery man. Like he has no one else to worry about and he will show up exactly when they want him to. oh no… traffic does not matter…weather none. He must be sitting around the corner waiting till exactly 2:30 to deliver to me!