DPD trauma

[tauzero]

I bought a Warwick Thumb 5 from someone in Italy, who used Skynet to send it to me. That finished up with DPD at this end. Originally DPD said delivery would be on the 24th, and I'd be given a one hour delivery slot when it was loaded onto the van, by about 11:00. 11:00 on the 24th came and went, no sign of a delivery slot, and then the status changed to delivery on 25th, allegedly at my request. 11:00 on the 25th came and went, and no sign of a delivery slot, so I contacted DPD. The artificial stupidity bot had a pretty limited repertoire, so I spoke to a human instead. Gave him parcel number, name, first line of address, and postcode, and he said "no, that's not the postcode". What seemed to have happened was that the address was correct, including the postcode, but there are separate postal town and postcode fields, and although the postal town was correctly set to Tamworth, the postcode was B77 1AA which looks like a generic Tamworth postcode rather than my actual postcode.

So he changed the postcode field and then it was supposed to be delivered on Monday 28th. You know what's coming, don't you? So on Monday early afternoon I rang up, and was told it had been misplaced. Cue horrible sinking feeling. The very helpful customer service chap said he'd open a complaint and get a depot search started. Checking the parcel status yesterday morning, it had been scanned in the early hours, so it wasn't lost, and was being delivered later, and I'd be notified of a delivery slot by about 11:00. Can anybody guess what happened at 11:00? If you guessed "bugger all", award yourself a sweetie. Then the status changed to delivery today. So I opted to collect it from the depot, as it became increasingly obvious that they were utterly incapable of loading it onto a van to get it to me, and today at about 10:30 I collected it, fortunately intact. I was half expecting DPD to ask me for rent, it had been there for so long.

I'm not going to go into a stupid rant about how nobody should ever use DPD, because they're normally reliable. However, it would appear that if one little bit of grit gets into the machine, everything goes titsup. In future, with any courier, if there's an inexplicable change of delivery date, I shall be straight on to them rather than hope that things will turn out. The situation could have been even worse - as I'm now out of work, I can sit around waiting for parcels.

[Monkey Steve]

Glad it turned up, if severely delayed. 

Have to say, while I don't think  that DPD are any better than the rest in terms of looking after packages, etc, their comms and app usually make it much easier to plan your life rather that leaving you sat at home all day with no idea of when to expect them...obvs not great when they leave you hanging.

Immediate derail, but on Monday I ordered a couple of items from Amazon and seeing that they could deliver that evening, I clicked on that.  I didn't have any plans for that night so it wasn't an evening wasted when it didn't arrive (not that I let Amazon know that) but there was no contact from them to explain or apologise.  On clicking on tracking the following day there was a somewhat confusing message that it was due to be delivered on the 28th, and the page would be updated when the order was dispatched.  So off goes a stroppy e-mail which got the response that yes, their system messed up, but they couldn't fix it and I needed to cancel the order and place another one for the same items.  Hmmm.  Though they did give me a tenner credit so not all bad