5 Comments
Nov 8, 2020Liked by Alistair Dabbs

I live on a small private road (not as posh as it sounds, former groundskeeper / handyman / janitor houses that once belonged to the local college) which has the same post code as the road it is connected to. Hilarity ensues when the pizza gets delivered to the wrong street and house even though I give ‘delivery instructions’ like ‘Not X Road, head up the hill until you see our street sign Y Row.’ Even sofa’s and washing machines go missing.

Council say Post Office need to correct the street address but they ‘may’ change the post code of the street instead of just dropping the X Road part so not subjecting my neighbours to that chaos. I’ll just have to settle for 1 hr telephone calls to electricity / gas suppliers trying to explain that the meter they think they are upgrading to a smart meter is clearly not at X Road as I live at Y Row and it’s my meters they are trying to change.

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Nov 10, 2020Liked by Alistair Dabbs

Have faith in humanity...

I have the exact opposite experience. I live in Thailand and I have all my online shopping delivered at my working place because it is more convenient for them (often 3 pick-up trucks every day as we have 1000+ students living on campus). Pre-lock-down, they used to deliver around noon but since September, it is rather around 5 and I am back home by that time.

On one of my last order, I had a call on a Thursday evening, so I explained the lady that I was not there anymore, could she present the item again on Friday, and it will have to be before 3 as I need to leave early. On Friday around 11, I got a phone call, it was my box. She had made a special delivery for me, out of her usual route, just to accommodate my schedule. I thanked her profusely for that.

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Nov 13, 2020Liked by Alistair Dabbs

In Hartlepool, England, we have DPD. Apparently they have not enough vans for the parcels they have to deliver, and only one driver called 'Sid'. In order to meet their performance targets they are in the habit of throwing a 'We tried to deliver but you wer out' card through the letterbox and updating their computers appropriately, often adding a photograph of your house/place of work. My wife once sat in the loading bay of her employer with the door, which is 6 meters high, open for an entire day, having had an email on the previous day, accompanied by a photo of the door closed saying they couldn't deliver. The following day, they sent her the same photo of the building with the door miraculously closed.

DPD's capacity for not being arsed to deliver pales into comparison with Currys PC Worlds ability to do a drive by non-delivery, where I waited in, and at the appointed time an unmarked white van drove past the house. When I rang CPW at the end of the day to ask where my delivery was, they said I hadn't been in. They said they had a photo of the house, however it was so blurred that they couldn't make out the house number, presumably because it was taken from a moving vehicle. They then waived the delivery charge, which included taking away the packaging, so when they subsequently did manage to deliver, they didn't take the packaging away.

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