Oops, UPS…
by John Weckerle
When Friday morning dawned, your editor was looking forward to a weekend that would involve a certain amount of photography – because a new camera was due to arrive that day. Having paid extra for two day delivery, we anticipated the weekend with a certain excitement. The UPS tracking indicated that the package was “out for delivery” at 6:16 a.m., so it seemed that delivery was a certainty. The package, however, never showed up, and at 7:36 p.m. somebody entered an exception: “emergency conditions beyond UPS’ control.” A new delivery date was “unavailable.”
Now, as it turns out, your editor had Friday off and, with errands and appointments in both Edgewood and Albuquerque, managed to traverse nearly every possible road that the UPS truck could have taken to get to our location (including the one it usually takes). The Albuquerque errands actually took us right past the UPS distribution center on the way home. The sun was shining all day, and the roads were clear. So we called UPS and, on the first round, got a very unhelpful person named “Mike” who indicated that no information regarding the nature of the “emergency conditions” was available, nor was a revised delivery date, but it would be at least Monday before delivery because we had not paid for weekend delivery. I offered to pick the package up Saturday, but apparently UPS in Albuquerque is closed Saturdays. Before I could offer to pick it up Monday, “Mike” hung up on me, or we were disconnected. I then tried the e-mail support, and at least got an apology on that one, but they again could not give me a new delivery date and stated that they didn’t have to refund the two-day shipping charge because “emergency conditions beyond UPS’ control” apparently exempts them from doing so.
I called again yesterday and got a more helpful person, “Susan,” who guaranteed that the package would absolutely, positively be delivered Monday. With a potentially substantial winter storm barreling toward us, we have our doubts, but we’ll take them at their word for now – and hold them to it. But that’s not really the purpose of this article…
The people in our neck of the woods have reputedly been experiencing a great deal of dissatisfaction with UPS’s performance over the past year or so, and it seems that anytime we gripe about it we end up hearing somebody else’s UPS horror story. One neighbor’s packages were, for a while, being left unsecured at the subdivision gate. We had a package show up last February, which we had sent from Florida during a visit there, looking as if it had been used as a pinata, with the contents destroyed. Our packages are routinely left under the drip line of the sun porch roof rather than on the covered porch just a few yards away. And so on…
…Which leads us to ask our readers: Are you having problems with package delivery, UPS, FedEx (we’ll leave that story for another time), USPS, etc.? If so, we’d like to hear your comments; maybe if we get enough of them in one place, someone will start paying attention.