The story of Amazon Prime and UPS – Part 3 “United Parcel Surprise”

Read Part 1 here: The story of Amazon Prime and UPS – Part 1 “United Parcel Stealers”

Read Part 2 here: The story of Amazon Prime and UPS – Part 2 “United Parcel Safari”

This would be a good time to explain my living situation. I live in an apartment complex with many units. Per building, there are 12 apartments and a security door. An important thing to note is that amazon ships packages via UPS with no signature required. Taken from the amazon prime FAQ: “Expedited shipping, including FREE Two-Day Shipping, may require signatures for orders over $700,” the assumption (which I confirmed by speaking directly to amazon.com shipping personnel) being that under $700, no signature is required.

97% of the time, a UPS driver has access to the security door and leaves my packages (when they’re not stolen within the UPS system — see Part 1) above the mailbox. 1% of the time, if a signature is required, the UPS driver leaves the package with the staff in the rental office of my apartment complex, who maintain office hours until 7pm to accommodate pickup of packages for those of us residents who work (among other reasons). 1% of the time, the driver is an asshole and decides to leave an infonotice. The other 1% of the time, the driver is a real piece of garbage and does what you will read about below.

If you don’t know, an infonotice is a slip of paper that notifies you that a delivery attempt was made at your residence and that you need to call a national call center (staffed by international operators). If you do not call, a second attempt at delivery is made the next day whenever they want; usually it is at a time that they know you will not be home. If you do call, you can arrange to hold the package at the facility for pickup later that evening. I don’t know about you, but part of the reason I paid for amazon prime to avoid driving somewhere to get something, and to get it to my door as quickly as possible. I don’t want to make phone calls to foreign people and drive somewhere later that night or a few days later to pick up a package; I could have just gone to the store and avoided a bunch of steps.

Some real ridiculousness happened when I ordered the Rambo box set on Blu Ray back in May. Here’s a screen capture of the full tracking history:

Order placed 5/11, Out for delivery 5/12. Amazon prime is totally worth it, right? The UPS driver, for the first time ever, decides to not leave the package either inside of my building or at the rental office. On top of that, the driver did not even leave an infonotice. So, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t arrange to pick up the package. I called the national call center, entered the tracking number, and spoke to someone who told me a local representative had to call me back. I was cooking when the callback happened, and didn’t hear my phone. The local representative left me a voicemail instructing me to, and I kid you not, “sign the back of the infonotice.” So I had to call the national center yet again and explain this whole debacle. When the local person called back, and I told her there was no infonotice, she just hung up on me. So I wrote the driver a nasty note, labeled it (in red marker “infonotice”) and left it outside. As you can see from the above screen capture, it was delivered the next day.

It doesn’t end there…