Before we begin, let me ask you something:
Is this not clear?
Because it looks pretty clear to me. How about this:
So I waited.
10:30 came.
11:00 came.
11:30 came.
I called FedEx.
11:37 and FedEx arrives. OH but it’s the FedEx guy who was delivering my dot-Mac package (for which a signed door tag was left yesterday, but he didn’t leave it. Why? Good question! Yet another example of FedEx not doing what they said they would do.).
My iMac is still not here.
11:39 FedEx calls and tells me that he can’t “come back” until 3-4. I say that I have a door tag here saying that he will be here by 10:30. She says that they are only obligated to attempt delivery once per day. Whu-huh?
“He was already there once this morning…” she starts.
“NO HE WASN’T!” I yelled. They pull this crap all the time, i.e. “Well we tried to deliver it but no one was there. Except that this morning I’ve been here and haven’t left.”
“Well let me get him back on the phone.”
She put me on hold.
A few minutes later, she came back, “Sir, delivery in your area isn’t even scheduled until 3-4pm..”
“I have a door tag here that says 10:30.”
Her: “He says he wrote 4:30 and maybe there was a misunderstanding.”
“Misunderstanding? Would you like me to scan this and email it to you? Would you like the tracking number and your website information so you can see that it says 10:30? The door tag says ‘We tried to deliver a shipment of 1 pieces at 15:03 [note the use of 24-hour time] on 12NOV07. ’ Then it says, in big bold letters: ‘We’ll return before 10:30 on 13NOV’… ”
Her: “Well clearly he isn’t going to be there by 10:30.”
“I know that, but telling me he isn’t going to be here until 3 is bull.”
Her: “He has to run his route in a certain order. If he goes to you and you’re way out we may not get to several people down the line in time.”
“That’s really not my problem. He said that he would be here by 10:30 and he’s not.”
Previously I mentioned to here 2 or 3 times that I was home from work because I was waiting for this package.
Her: “Do you work somewhere?”
“Do I work somewhere? Haven’t I already said several times that I’m home from work? Of course I work somewhere.”
Her: “He said he would be willing to try and deliver it to you at work if you wanted, which he is not obligated to do.”
(Only later did I think: “So he can deviate from his schedule to deliver it somewhere else, but not to honor the time that he said he would be here?” At the time I thought: “Yeah, I can see where this is going, I’ll go there and he’ll come here.” Plus it’s not very convenient for me to wait by the door of our office, and I can’t see the office door from my office. Plus it’s an iMac, I don’t want to lug it from the office to my car and from my car to the house when I had scheduled it to be delivered to my front door.)
Me: “Please don’t make it sound like he is doing me any favors when this whole situation was caused by him.”
So let’ recap:
1) She tried to tell me that he had been here already today, which was either a lie or ignorance.
2) She tried to tell me that the tag he left said 4:30, which is a lie as well as directly contradicting what I had told her. Fortunately for me I have documentation.
3) She told me that delivery in my area was only scheduled for the afternoon.
At no point was there any effort made to fulfill their obligation to me in a timely manner. There was not even a sense of any obligation at all, actually. “Oh, it says 10:30 but we meant 4:30” is neither an explanation nor an apology.
If I told you that I would be to your house by 10:30 and didn’t show up and didn’t call for an hour, you’d consider me rude. If I then called you at 11:40 to say that I meant 4:30, you’d think I was either rude or stupid, or both. Now consider that you are paying me and I told you I would be there by 10:30. Then, having told me that you are sitting home waiting for me, I tell you “Well I have other people to see, I can’t come by until late this afternoon.”
Would you stay friends with a person like that?
Would you continue to do business with a person like that?
This is not nearly the first time that I have had this problem with shipments from Apple via FedEx.
I ordered an iPod a few weeks ago. It was supposed to be delivered to the office on Friday. Now our office is closed on Friday, but we were having a rummage sale at the church, so I was there (with dozens of other people) all day long.
Sometime late in the afternoon, the tracking page said “Customer Not Available.” Which was a lie. No door tag was left (the driver told the dispatcher that he had run out. Convenient, eh?). Monday, he tried delivery at 5:05. To an office building. Which closes at 1pm (although people had been there until 3 or 4).
Mind you, we aren’t talking about New York City or Pittsburgh or Columbus. This is Gallipolis, Ohio, population 4,800.
The UPS guy can make it to us before 1pm no problem. The FedEx guy never even tries.
Oh, and no door tag was left on Monday either. Must have “forgotten” them again.
On Tuesday it was delivered to an office building next to ours. This same office building, by the way, was open on the previous Friday when he had (allegedly) tried to deliver a package and found no one home. (Actually my guess is that he knew that the office wasn’t scheduled to be open on Friday and so he never even bothered to check. Can’t prove it, of course, but he’d have to be completely blind to miss the people coming in and out of the building.)
It may be true that in order to be close to fulfilling their obligation to me, deliveries to some of their other customers may have been delayed.
That’s really not my problem.
I don’t say that to be rude or arrogant, just to state a fact. They were hired to do a job, and said that they would be done by 10:30 on Nov 13th. It may make business sense for them to just screw me over (1 customer) rather than delay several other deliveries. But honestly, our home is only a few miles from town, and again, we aren’t talking about hundreds of thousands of people here. Last I knew the population of the county was something like 30-40,000.
This is sloppiness (not minding one’s promises) and laziness (unwilling to try to do anything about it) and either ignorance or lying.
And it’s not just a one-time event. It’s a pattern, a habit. Search for FedEx on this site and you will see a great number of instances similar to this one. (Be sure to hit the “Older Entries” link at the bottom of the search results page, otherwise it may just look like there’s one match.)
I wish, I wish, I wish that Apple would offer its customers another shipping option.