Saturday, May 14, 2011

UPS Has Some Sucky Drivers

I was supposed to receive my Joby SLR-Zoom order from Amazon today and I was really looking forward to getting started with shooting for the Mendel project. However, UPS screwed up and must have delivered it to the wrong address.

We have a bad history with UPS at this house. Sometimes their tracking says "no such address" even though they've delivered here before. I really think that the UPS drivers who don't normally deliver here may sometimes feel like they don't want to go to the trouble, and they put "no such address" as an excuse and leave. I get it, we are hard to find, but seriously! Once someone at UPS has figured out where we are is there no way to share that information with the rest of UPS, like put it in our record or something and not have this problem any more.

Apparently not. Amazon's online help says to call the carrier, and I did. According to them the only way to get something added to our record is for the shipper to complain, and when I finally did figure out how to contact Amazon by phone they said they can't do the thing that UPS wants to get them to note the record.

Amazon Tip: If you don't receive your order from Amazon even though UPS tracking says it's been "delivered", you need to go to the "returns" process at Amazon. That's counter-intuitive, clearly, and it threw me off for a while. In the "returns" process there is a place to indicate that you did not receive your order, and then from there you follow the yellow brick road. It ends up, optionally, that instead of calling them you input your number and they call you. They were prompt and the customer service agent could be easily understood. They are sending me a fresh box. If there are no more f**k-UPS then it will be here Friday.

So, no shooting until Friday at the earliest, but realistically I'll probably get started next week.

2 comments:

Mark Kimsal said...

Nothing more frustrating than trying to get a delivery from USP/Fedex/USPS. When it works, it's amazing. When it fails it's so frustrating.

Unknown said...

Yes. I'm frequently amazed that I can get anything from Amazon and have it here in two days. I ordered our lawn mower from Amazon shortly after we signed up for Amazon Prime. So I love it, but really, it's just that much more disappointing when it doesn't work.