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Good things come out of bad experiences. On October 9, 2000 my parents shipped a filing cabinet, an expensive leather jacket, a marble ball, a backpack and various other items to me via UPS ground. The delivery process should have taken five business days, seven days maximum. I have been tracking the package for the last two weeks. It has been sitting in the Menlo Park-Palo Alto shipping hub for about five days. Every day last week I called the their 800 number and a representative told me it should be at my apartment the next day. Everyday I placed a note on my door for UPS to leave the package. The note went like this:
10/18/00
Dear UPS Person,
Please leave the package at the door. Thanks!
Elan Freydenson [Print]
Elan Freydenson [Signature]
Everyday I came home, the note was still there and the package was not to be found. I called this past Friday and they said it should be here today. Today, my mother called me at work to tell me she got a message from UPS on my Jersey answering machine explaining that the package fell apart and the filing cabinet was broken. UPS took the liberty to repack what is left of the contents and ship them back to the origin.
Of course, they ship back via the same method it came, so it should take another two weeks for the parts to reach New Jersey. I actually understand their logic. There is logic to their actions (or I'm just projecting logic onto their actions). They are treating my residential packages like commercial ones. If I was a business and sent a package of something I sold to a customer and it came in pieces, then that would be very bad. So, they take the parts, pack them together and shipped them to the origin so as not to upset the receiver. Well, the freaking parts (my clothes and personal belongings) were sitting minutes from my house for over a week (and they wouldn’t let me come get it, either) and now my "parts" are on their way back to Jersey. This was not an ideal UPS experience, more like an "OOPS, I dropped your package" experience. To top it off, my parents didn't insure the contents.
Now for the good part of all this. I left the apartment this morning with the sign on the door for UPS. I returned home to a box from Northpoint. They shipped my DSL modem. Later today, while eating dinner, I realized there was a sticker on the box saying, "signature required." Apparently, the Airborne Express man left with Mr. UPS' note. Had the UPS package arrived there would not have been a note for Mr. Express. Thankfully, UPS screwed up, so I could get my DSL modem today (which is totally useless to me until the DSL guys come to install it later this week, but at least I got it, right?).
So, remember kiddies, today’s little lesson is that really great things come out of bad experiences.
Want more? Go home.
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