I've been known to bash the Post Office once in a while. But, to be fair, we have horror stories to go with each of our parcel carriers, here at Blowfish.
Recently, a customer ordered some stuff from us, via UPS 2nd Day Air, to be delivered to her house in Alaska. UPS claims that they deliver, themselves, to each and every street address in the United States.
Perhaps they believe Alaska to still be part of Russia.
When the parcel reached the UPS station in Fairbanks, we discover that, no, UPS does not deliver to that particular street address in one of their happy wrapping-paper brown trucks. Instead, it appears that they see who is driving by, yell out the window, “Hey! Going to So-and-So's place?” If the local in their pickemup-truck answers in the affirmative, the parcel is tossed into the back next to the deer carcass, and Old Mort in the truck is entrusted with the delivery.
In this particular case, Old Mort seems to have been hitting the Ranier Pale Ale a bit too hard (well, it is February in Alaska, you would too), and throws it onto the wrong step.
Eventually, after much complaining to UPS, we get them to call Old Mort to go back out and get the rifled package and toss it onto our customer's porch. The unintended recipient has rifled it, but apparently doesn't like any of the stuff that our customer has has ordered, so Mort was able to extract the package.
The customer was very nice about it, thank goodness, although she was a bit mortified about having her order be quite so public. We were pretty mortified, too.
But, so far, UPS has never lost a $600 package off of one of their trucks, like Fedex Ground did to us.
posted 19:46