I pre-ordered a TRON-styled PS3 controller from PDP in December for a mid-January release. “Super
Saver” shipping was available for a very pleasant $2.99, so I chose that. The carrier wasn’t specified, but given the
low price, I assumed it would be USPS. I
used my home address for the destination, envisioning finding a funky new vidya
game controller in my mailbox one day the next month. Yay, happy times!
Here, I’ll make an aside that appears unrelated, but will be
relevant later. Later in December, I was
to receive an Express envelope via FedEx. It was addressed to my house, but I was out of town when it
arrived. Somehow, the driver knew this and delivered it to my office instead. Helpful, yet simultaneously a bit creepy.
I received a shipping notice for the controller on 1/20, surprisingly
revealing that the package was coming via FedEx. OK, fine, I guess. Whatever. (Though I did flash briefly back to Vangelus’s recent painful FedEx story. “Ah, that was just a fluke,” I mused. “And hey, that was in CANADA . It probably happened because they use moose and
beavers to deliver packages up there.”)
On 1/25, I came home from work to find a FedEx tag on my door,
left at 10:24AM. “No big deal,” I
thought, “I’ll just sign the tag, leave it on the door, and they’ll leave the
package on the porch tomorrow.” But
wait! The tag showed that an IN-PERSON
signature was required. I couldn’t just leave it on the door. What? I'd never seen that for a previous shipment.
The tag listed a “Hold at FedEx Location” option, which I
explored on their website. The site
listed several facilities capable of that feature, the nearest of which is 22
miles away. It’s in another town, one I
visit every two or three weeks, but I wasn’t planning on going there for the
next several days. Therefore, it was
time to call them.
Naturally, it took several tries to get through the voice
recognition system to an actual person. It
didn’t recognize anything related to “problem”. (Because “Who could ever have a problem with
our service???”, I guess.) Once I
reached a rep, I explained the situation, and said that no one would be home in
the morning on weekdays. Given, y’know,
that people have jobs. I asked if the delivery
could be changed to my office, a mere 2.3 miles away. The rep replied, “Sure!”
“Great!”
“There will be an extra charge of $11 for that.”
Bwa? “$11?”
“Yes. But you don’t
have to pay it. It will be charged to
the shipper.”
I saw no way PDP would go for that noise, especially since
that’s $8 more than I paid them for shipping in the first place. So I asked if the package could be delivered
to my house in the afternoon, say, after 1:00. The rep told me, essentially, “We’ll get a
message to the driver, but no promises.”
On 1/26, a tag was once again left on my door, this time at
11:45AM. (That’s CLOSE to afternoon,
FedEx, but no banana.) Sigh. I resigned myself to a 22-mile drive to pick
up my controller, and went back to the website to set it up. However, after entering the tracking number
and selecting the “Hold” option, the site offered only one location: 57
miles away, in a town I never visit. No
way, Jose.
I called FedEx and went through the whole rigmarole again. This time, the rep ASSURED me that she was
arranging for the driver to deliver the package the next day, between 1:00 and
3:00 PM. (The wife would be home
then.) She said this was being noted in
their system so that other reps and the driver could see it. She even took my cell number, saying the
driver would call me “to meet somewhere” if the delivery couldn’t happen during
those hours. I asked if there would be a
surcharge for that.
“No.”
“If the driver can do that, why would you charge the shipper
$11 to change the delivery address to my office?”
I received the telephone equivalent of a shrug. Despite that, I was becoming hopeful that I’d
actually receive my shiny new gewgaw the next day.
Boy, that was stupid.
At around 11:00 AM on 1/27, I checked the tracking out of
morbid curiosity. Sure enough, another
“delivery exception” at 9:53 AM.
That’s right: the driver had come to my
home even earlier than the first two days. At that point, I was – understandably, I feel
– rather peeved. In addition, I became
worried that FedEx would decide to send the package back to PDP, given that
they’d made three delivery attempts. (As
Vangelus knows, delivery attempts are a limited resource that must be used
sparingly!)
I called FedEx… again. After I laid out the spiel once more, rep #3 told me that there were no
notes about an afternoon delivery request in the system. %#@*&$. I expressed my disappointment at their handling of this whole situation, and asked if
they would attempt delivery again. The
rep apologized in that hackneyed canned-rep-apology way, and said delivery
would be reattempted on Monday, 1/30. (Luckily,
that would actually work, as I’m not scheduled to be in the office 1/30 or 1/31.)
So, that’s the end, right?
Wrong.
The wife called my office around noon, telling me she’d just
gotten home to find the third door tag. (Maybe I’ll start a collection!) I told her I already knew, and that delivery
was set for Monday. However, she told me
the driver had written a note on the tag: “Will come back tomorrow but I’m always out of town before 12. You can call XXX-XXXX my cell and I could
meet you.”
I figured, “What the hell?” and called. The driver, who was extremely nice, said that
she had actually received the message requesting PM delivery, but her route only
takes her through my town in the morning. She had tried to call me, too, but the phone number listed in the
message was wrong. It wasn’t even close
to right, even though phone rep #2 had repeated it back to me. She told me she was a “FedEx Home” driver,
and that “Home” runs Tuesdays through Saturdays. (So wait, FedEx phone reps don’t even know
what days their drivers deliver things?)
It had been this same driver attempting delivery all three
times, and she said she’d be back the next morning: Saturday, 1/28. “Will someone be home?”
I assured her I would. “Cool,” I thought, “I’ll finally be done with this tomorrow.” [Spoilers:
nope.]
She seemed willing to answer questions, so I asked her about
the $11 charge for delivery address changes, referencing the earlier episode of
the Express driver independently deciding to deliver to my office rather than
my home. “Oh, Express guys are
union. They can do stuff like
that.” It seems Express drivers are
unionized folks employed directly by FedEx, but Home and Ground drivers are hired
through independent contractors. And
apparently, they aren’t treated as well. According to her, if a Home or Ground driver misdelivers a package –
even if it’s just to the house next door and the customer still ends up
receiving it – said driver can be fined $500 by FedEx. The fine is $1000 for a second
occurrence. What I gleaned from our conversation
is that FedEx is unwilling to accept any blame or cost themselves, instead
shifting it all to contracted non-union drivers or – in the case of the address
change fee – customers.
At any rate, on the morning of 1/28, I was fooling around on
my computer when the phone rang. The
Caller ID showed “FEDEX GROUND”, so I guessed maybe someone was calling to make
sure I was home. Sadly, no. Instead, it was a rep telling me the truck
containing my package had broken down, so my package was sitting on the truck,
in the shop. “So it won’t be delivered
today,” he said.
“Is it standard procedure for you to leave packages on a
broken-down truck, rather than moving them to another truck so they can be
delivered?”
“Well,” he countered, “we didn’t expect the truck to break
down. And it’s just your package and a
few Ground packages on there.” (Gee,
thanks for not answering my question in the slightest.)
Rep-number-the-fourth assured me that the package would be delivered
Monday, 1/30. Then, “Oh, wait, it’s a
FedEx Home package, so it’ll be Tuesday.”
I’ll hold my breath.