self sighting...(long)

[Sarlon]

I'm ashamed of myself for loosing my temper and not apologizing....but damn this guy brought me nearly to tears.

So last week I found something that I could only find in stock on a website out of England. I needed it here before next weekend (feb 21), so i paid quite a bit of money to get it here faster.

the moment I can, I see its being shipped by fedup....er.....fedex, so I go to their site, set up an account, and track my package with email updates. Monday rolls around (order placed and processed by Saturday) and package is picked up for delivery from company.

fedex's website saying I can give them options on where to leave my package (small package just a hair over 2 pounds), and find the option for them to just leave it at my front door. I've had packages delivered before and left on my porch, never had an issue with them being stolen or anything.

So fast forward to Wednesday (yesterday), I'm sitting in a classroom waiting for my next class to start, and I get an email stating an update about my package...I think awesome, its been delivered and I can go home after this class and get my new shiny!

So I open the email, only for it to tell me that the package was unable to be delivered since no one was home! this annoys me since it says its being delivered to a town 35-40 minutes away from me rather than my town.

So I call fedup, and find out whats going on....APPARENTLY the package HAD to be signed for (something I was never told), and that the driver was already on the way back to the office and might try and redeliver it at noon....10 minutes from the time I was on the phone, or tomorrow......at or around noon, when I was going to be on campus all day even later then that day.

After going back and forth and me starting to loose my temper, and him keeping telling me i had to wait at home (missing work and class) for the package to arrive, OR drive to town 40 minutes away to get my package OR it would be returned to the sender (note this sender is in England, I'd have to wait all over again for it to get back here). I'm SEVERELY upset with this guy for telling me no other option till I basically get it through his head to give me another option....

"Oh, I GUESS I could put in a request to have it resent later today....but i can't promise it will happen."

At this point I'm nearly in tears from anger, so I say I'll be home by 2pm, can it be delivered anytime after that? He says "I'll put in the request.....its done....have a good day....*click*"

Ladies and gentlemen....the ONLY thing I hate about cellphones is you can't slam them down when you're upset with someone....you can only angrily push the end button...

10 minutes later I get a call from a local number who tells me that unfortunately the driver is unable to return to my town today, but would be MORE than happy to transfer the package to the local fedup store (not 5 minutes from my house) for me to pick up at my leisure by noon tomorrow (Thursday).

I thank her gratefully and plan on picking up said package later this afternoon!

[notalwaysright]

I've had luck with leaving a note signed and dated (please leave package tracking #1234, NAR, 2/12/15) on my door, that is, if I know it's supposed to be signed for. Currently I think I have given my permission to every carrier to never need a signature. You have to go through some process for this to work.

At this point I'm nearly in tears from anger, so I say I'll be home by 2pm, can it be delivered anytime after that? He says "I'll put in the request.....its done....have a good day....*click*"

Rude. And wow, driver already on the way back? Around here delivery drivers are so overworked it's sad. I get packages at 8:00PM because they have so much they have to do in one day.

Story: Years ago when I was still going to anime conventions, I was awaiting a package. Like yours, it wasn't a common item (wig dye) and I needed it to do a trial run. Anyway, it showed delivered. Note said something about "near porch." Oh, this was the postal service. The front porch was small, and there were bushes and flowers around it. No package. I call the post office, hoping it was there. Nope. I talk to my mail man, and he hadn't been the one to deliver it, it had been someone else because he had been out sick that day. I email the sender thinking it had gotten returned, nope. At this point I figure it got delivered to the wrong house, and I'm making arrangements to get a replacement sent ASAP at my expense.

Then my brain goes *click* and I walk out the back door. There's a tiny little wooden platform, which I never thought of as a porch. I thought of it as the back steps. There, tucked in the corner of the steps and the side of the house is the package! (Not by the back door, down on the ground) For no reason at all, the temporary postman walked around my house, through a gate, and across the lawn to essentially hide the package out of sight of anyone. It was mid-winter, and I didn't go out back every day. This was a good neighborhood, and the front porch was partly hidden from the street by the railing and bushes. There was no reason to walk around my house. No other delivery person ever did, it the three years I lived there.

[cindybubbles]

This is why I'm lucky to live in a condo. Here, the postal workers have to dial my apartment code number to reach me. If I'm not there to sign for my package, they have to take it to the nearest post office and leave a note in my mailbox telling me where I could pick it up.

[Catwoman2965]

Ugh. I'm dealing with an issue right now, which I think has been resolved, but we shall see. I had to replace my laptop as mine crapped out. Best price etc. was directly from HP. Online. Ok fine, i order, it says est ship date is in a couple of weeks, fine, and then FREE delivery will be 5-7 business days. but it gave me the option to pay $20 for TWO day shipping. Which I did.

Cue to this week, when its showing as shipped, a week ahead of schedule, but est delivery is next week. Um no, just no. I paid extra, and while I'm ok with it arriving when it does, I want the extra $$ I paid refunded. So I called their CS number, got someone who said the refund would be processed. just waiting to see if it actually is. But as it shipped from China, if two day wasn't an option, which i suspect it isn't, then WHY give me the option to pay for it?????

[Ophbalance]

Ya... HP now ships everything out of China. It's a huge pain in the arse. My new machine blew a mainboard on day 2 of ownership, and I had purchased the 3 year "if the laptop is dropped out a window we'll still fix it" warranty. They wanted at first to have me ship back the old machine back, before sending me a new one. Something like a 3-4 week turnaround... totally unacceptable. Finally got through to them the extended warranty and I had to ship it out to IL with a total downtime of 10 days.

[KuariKaydrith]

I used to work for HP tech support many many moons ago. It's fairly standard - even with the 3yr extended protection warranty - for them to expect the customer to pay to ship the laptop back at the customer's expense. If a customer pushed for it we would send out mailing labels but that was only when the customer was irate and demanded it.

The reason HP wants you to send the old machine back first is due in large part to having been ripped off multiple times - they used to send out a new machine with return labels to send back the old one. They would keep the old machine, repair it, and sell it to an unsuspecting person...and then report it stolen. Imagine the poor people calling in for support on a machine that they bought in good faith only to have their computer come up flagged as stolen? Yeah, it was a mess, but you can blame the assholes for the inconvenience they caused.

[Ophbalance]

Actually, I blame HP for not sending a tech out to honor their 3 day onsite warranty . The board wouldn't even POST (which kinda strongly suggest that the mainboard is just gone), and they refused to send a tech on the grounds that "We cannot determine cause of failure at this time". I didn't want a new machine, and if anything were to still happen beyond complete dismemberment of the laptop, still don't. Being down for an entire month would destroy my business. It wouldn't be nearly so bad now, but at the time I was completely down due to the kids dumping tea in my old laptop. I've since fixed that machine to have a backup but I still expect HP to honor the agreement that I paid extra for.

[KuariKaydrith]

A HP laptop with an on-site warranty? Um, that's a new one to me, tbh. I know that HP offers an onsite repair warranty, but that is not something that is generally sold for laptops. As an added bonus there are not authorized HP techs in all areas that can be sent out with-in the 3 business day time-frame - hence why that was not something offered during my time with HP, and I really can't see them changing it since I left. How can they get a a repair done in three days if there is not an authorized repair person in the customer's area? For some reason there were always fewer laptop techs out there than printer techs - I used to have access to a tool that would help to find the nearest authorized tech for the customer's needs and HP equipment.

Most authorized repair people are third-party and they are often only actually authorized for certain models of computers/printers, so if the local person isn't authorized to fix your model then the only way to get repair service is to send it off. During my time doing tech support for HP I would have told you the same thing about not being able to determine the cause of failure because we would have needed to run diags on it at the service center - I would have agreed that it was the mainboard being borked, but I would have had to follow company policy.

[wolfie]

During my time doing tech support for HP I would have told you the same thing about not being able to determine the cause of failure because we would have needed to run diags on it at the service center - I would have agreed that it was the mainboard being borked, but I would have had to follow company policy.

I wonder how long it'll be before some idiot manager decides to cut down on the cost of warranty repairs through the following method:

- Need to get the output of the diags before repairing anything.
- System won't even get to the "beep" in the POST? Then it can't run the diags.
- Diags won't run, therefore we can't get the info we need to fix it. You're on your own.

[Ophbalance]

It was one of the reasons I went with hp over Dell this time. That and Dell only really let's you customize alienware anymore. Turns out you have to first activate extended care before it's available. Something that took 3 hours of escalated calls to work out. And I get policy... But it's still frustrating to know the problem (and be able to fix it if I just had a new board seeing as I've already taken this machine apart).