It's Bullet Sunday on Easter Sunday! Bullets and Eggs... could there be a better combination?
• HAPPY EASTER! To all my friends who celebrate this day for whatever reason, I wish you the happiest of holidays and a wonderful Spring. My day was nice enough... dinner at grandma's house... but my car ended up covered with bird crap. And I mean covered. There is so much bird crap on my car that I'm fairly certain I could fertilize half the apple orchards in the valley. I didn't have enough quarters for a car wash, so now I'm driving the PoopMobile. Kind of an ominous start to my Spring, but it is what it is.
• THRILLER! Say what you like about the freakish nature of Michael Jackson but, after watching his final appearances on the This is It DVD, there's no denying the guy was a true musical artist. I am only a casual fan but have to admit I was amazed watching him prepare for his farewell tour. Even if you only like one or two Michael Jackson songs you owe it to yourself to see this film...
• UPS SUCKS! Yesterday I was supposed to be in Seattle hanging out with friends and family. But a freak snowstorm descended, canceling my plans. So long as a winter storm warning is in effect, I can't risk being trapped in Seattle while I'm still trying to get caught up with work after my vacation. Since I was going to be home, I was asked to help with an emergency. An iPad demo unit which has to be on its way to Europe on Monday wasn't going to arrive as planned, and a software developer friend of mine asked if I wouldn't mind sending my iPad out instead (then he would send his iPad to me next week when he got it). Of course I didn't mind at all. The only problem was that I live in a small town where Saturday Delivery isn't available, and I wasn't expecting my iPad to be here until Monday. So I called UPS to tell them to please route my iPad to a UPS Store in a nearby city that has Saturday Delivery. I could drive into town, pick it up, transfer the software, and then ship it out again no problem.
Except it WAS a problem. UPS refused to do a damn thing.
They wouldn't reroute the package. They wouldn't even contact the local UPS station to have them take it to the UPS Store. They wouldn't even let me drive to the actual station and pick it up there. They didn't offer any solution at all.
What fantastic customer service.
I'm amazed that I've done this with Fed-Ex a couple times before and they never even hinted that it was a problem. Fed-Ex just took care of it, and I never gave it a second thought. But to UPS it's massive drama and an overwhelming ordeal that they can't (or won't) help you with. They just don't care. Which meant my friend... a small tech developer just trying to stay in business another damn day... had to drive eight hours round-trip to solve a problem that UPS could have fixed in just a few minutes if they had even a hint of customer service.
So, lesson learned. If you want a company that actually gives a flying fuck, ship with Fed-Ex.
UPDATE: And so one of the voicemails I ignored at work this weekend was from my local UPS station trying to contact me to see if I wanted to have my package delivered to an alternative address or meet a driver to pick it up. This is exactly what I wanted to do all along, but was assured by the UPS Customer Service line that it was impossible. Apparently the local stations actually do give a crap about their customers, they just don't have any support from corporate. This is so frickin' typical of big businesses now-a-days that I can't even pretend to be surprised.
And, on that happy note, I'm off to wash clothes. How exciting is THAT?
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I’m not much for religion so Happy Easter Bunny Day!
In my musical opinion, and since I am deeply into music of all kinds, I have maintained for years that Michael Jackson is a musical genius. The freak part of him is to me the same as the emotional fragility in Van Gogh, the social ineptitude of Einstein, the utter nuttiness of Mozart. I don’t know why true artists are so troubled but it seems to make them who they are and musically, MJ is a genius.
I’m a Fed-Ex person myself. UPS almost always damages my stuff…the dirty bastards.
I think when it comes to shipping, it depends on how you region is. Down here in Sarasota, FedEx sucks major ass, but I receive over the top excellent service from UPS. Weird.
I am only a casual fan of MJ as well – my g/f and I decided to go see This Is It on a whim when it was in theaters. We were blown away, and ended up pre-ordering the DVD. The guy just oozes with talent. I also enjoyed watching his backup band, dancers, etc. – they are cream of the crop.
The UPS thing sounds strangely familiar to me.
When I sent me brother a present while he lived in the US, they first put it on the wrong plane or so, delaying the delivery by a week or so… by which time my brother had moved to a new place and they refused to deliver it there. (To complete the FAIL, they had also promised him to keep the parcel at their depot so he could pick it up, but when he arrived there it was just on a delivery van to his old place.)
Enjoy the laundry 😉
Your UPS rant reminded me of the days when my family’s company would have to send something via Delta Dash. “When you absolutely have to get it there first thing in the morning at the cost of a kidney – choose Delta Dash!”
Yeah you probably have no idea… try this f*up of UPSs.
I ship milk samples as part of my job to a lab in another town, 5 hours away. If I ship on monday, the boxes will arrive on Wednesday. Seeing as we don’t want MILK (even with a preservative in it) sitting on some loading dock over the weekend, you can see this limits my shipping days to Monday, Tues, and Wednesday.
So imagine when I leave my house with two boxes for shipment on Wednesday, we’ll call them box A and B. We go to the drop location (because even though I’m a business it’s an added cost to have them picked up from my residence) and happily drop off box A and B. 4 hours later I get a call from the drop off location telling me that they had done me a HUGE favor and labeled my boxes for me, and when could I come and pay please? I’m like WHA? And they say how the driver had come back because he noticed that the boxes didn’t have “current” (we reship the same boxes) labels on them and they’d “fixed” it. Ok, great thanks, sooo sorry I say, and I’ll be in first thing in the morning to cover the charges.
I then pull into my house and see box A and box B stilling on my porch. Son and I chuckle to ourselves about the odds that we ship out the same type boxes that arrive back. Ha ha. Until Son goes to bring the boxes in the house and we realize… THESE ARE THE EXACT boxes we had shipped earlier!
The driver picked up at the drop off location, and then must have continued on his drop off route? Got to my house and instead of leaving the empty/old boxes off his truck, left the full/current boxes.
I still haven’t seen the MJ thing, but plan on it; I’ve heard it’s a must see.
I had a problem with FedEx. I work in a town of about 400 people, our business is on Main Street. FedEx actually TURNED AROUND IN OUR YARD (2 semis, free standing sign, 2 signs on our office, all saying the company name) & said they couldn’t find us. I was with a customer, called FedEx immediately after, & it was too late to get them to come back. Overnight delivery of a phone turned into 5 days.
Yes, but UPS does not suck as much as the EPIC FAIL of the Post Office. They know the address, heck, they MADE the address of every home in America, yet they still can’t seem to get the electric bill to the right house. The only reason they’re still around is because only they can ship First-Class mail. That’s bureaucracy, for you. If they were a private company that had a motivation NOT TO HAVE MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR DEBT, they would use some basic good-business practices. First, chastise workers for delivering mail the wrong house. Take it out of their pay. Another thing, put people with disabilities in a job they can ACTUALLY DO. Instead of putting the guy with a physical disability on a route, put him behind the counter working with customers. Put the guy who can’t speak English in the route, not at customer service. They really end up doing these things. It’s sad. And give frequent customers some free stamps, or something. provide some incentive not to use the far superior Fed-Ex.
UPS does suck. I love Fed Ex. (Sucks for the local stations, though.)