Useless parcel Service

Ed the Editor's personal blog corner

After 4 phone calls repeating the same info 4 times, and after chasing down the road after a driver who already failed to find my house yesterday, I would just like to re-christen UPS - Useless Parcel Service. One of the greatest companies in America has a few issues that any part-time summer job trainee at HQ could address in two minutes flat.

The corporate idiots at the top are the ones to blame. They need to install a GPS in each delivery vehicle so drivers can have access to the same info as us civilian idiots with MapQuest. Or maybe drivers do have a Garmin of some description, they just don't know how to use it?

UPS leaders also need to work out the story and the policy for dealing with tracking issues. Currently their customer servants are told to repeat parrot fashion to irate parcel-less customers "We are trying to contact the driver." What does this bullshit statement mean? Are their drivers the only people out on the road who do not have a phone for emergencies? Or do drivers have some hi-tech Instant Message gizmo on their dashboard that they don't know how to turn on? Or is it more a case of the drivers can't abide the hopeless leadership and wantonly decide they are too busy to respond to any form of communication whatsoever, (till it is too late for a trip back to where they should have been 2 hours earlier?)

I think I could nail the answer to the vexing mis-communication issue by taking over a dispatcher's job for 2 minutes and announcing, "Driver A, please return to base immediately, you have been promoted and there is also a bonus pay check waiting for you. Please respond." I suspect that the bastard with no respect for his incompetent bosses would stick it to them and be homeward bound before I even had time to sit back in my chair.

They say UPS is a top rate company. I can assure you, this is typical of the corporate bull crap circulating the world faster than a speeding parcel. Exactly how efficient is a company that invests millions in aircraft that do fly from A to B every time on time, but their ground service has no navigation worth shit. What is the logic in having the best pilots, yet they need to employ a special driver to potter around the neighborhood in a station wagon, making deliveries the regular UPS van man fails to make because he is winging it, mapless and incommunicado? And how about getting with the program and using a database where the info I tell tracker agent 1 is the same as the info staring tracker agent 4 in the face, 6 hours later?

The summer break trainee should insist that UPS take 20% off the cost of parcel deliveries (financed by a reduction in the CEO's pay). As an incentive to get it right first time, the CEO will get his full pay once he has taught the drivers how to find their way around and give them a decent back-up from customer service on down. And to be fair, how about the drivers wise up and get a little more responsive to calls from their bosses at HQ? (One day they may not have a job and a boss to ignore.)

Get rid of the anarchy, and that way the UPS of this world don't get written about and struck off the list of companies I won't deal with again! (In case you think I am unreasonable, this is the second episode in a month, two different addresses, two nightmares, no refund, as you were, Sir!)