Grumpy Old Postal Whinge

I 'fess up - I multiblog. (The three audients I have all go "Well duh Ted!") I also write on Grumpy Old Guy among others and put this on that blog yesterday: Australia Post Cracks A Funny and now I'd LOVE to expound and expand on that. Because while I know everyone has a whinge with their postal and courier / delivery services, how many have had this many in ten years? 

Australia Post did deliver on the weekends but that was over a year ago when the pandemic had them more on the ropes than normal mail has apparently always had them. But they stopped doing it that time they announced that they were so busy that they'd made a record profit but rather than hiring more staff to cope they'd just stop picking up local packages for three days while they had a jolly good cry and a Bex powder. 

Since then they've been backlogged, have - seemingly, from the results I've seen - NOT made any progress in improving and growing to meet the challenge of a post-pandemic country with a LOT more people using online ordering and delivery, and weekends haven't been done for around a year.

So when I got a text message on Saturday morning telling "you parcel from Xyzzy Co will be delivered today" I was wondering what had changed. 

The text message sort of gave me hope that they might have finally got the message that we would really like to see those record profits to be returned to us in the form of better faster service, at last. Hmmm yeah well, colour me naive . . .

But surprise surprise, the item from Xyzzy Co didn't arrive Saturday, nor even Sunday, despite the Australia Post text message quite specifically stating that the parcel was to be delivered that same day. 

But a second, different, unannounced parcel arrived - it's just that it arrived on Monday. I received it, checked the consignment number and realised that it still wasn't the parcel referred to. But that's about par for the course with such a shambolic mess of a company, so it didn't worry me untowardly. 

Then the parcel from Xyzzy Co arrived later that afternoon.  

And then later that evening I read that article about AP's "improvements" to their system so that they'd have far more accurate delivery time messages. . . It seems they can talk the talk, but the walk's still just a series of jerks and spasms and a lot of thrashing about.

Back to the roast.

When we moved house a few years ago, our redirection was - hit and miss . . . - to say the least. From that time to the present they've attempted to deliver parcels for us to a similar looking address - but in another suburb we've never lived in - and then returning the parcel to sender because they read the street name and number - but the postcode and correct suburb name I N   L A R G E   C A P I T A L   L E T T E R S apparently are just a suggestion. 

And

They've claimed to be unable to find a safe place to deliver a parcel when we have a delivery point and it's in the delivery instructions we attach to posted items and so we've had to pick it up at the PO anyway.

And

There was a letter that had mistakenly been sent here I clearly wrote NATA (Not At This Address) on - and which promptly arrived again. Three times before I took it into the local PO and said if I had to take it out of our letterbox again I'd be sending them a bill for my delivery services. 

And

One delivery was declined because apparently we had a "large unfriendly dog." At the time we had two cats that had a secluded cat yard out the back, the gate wide open, and not a dog to be seen for miles around. 

And

Then going back a few more years there was a letter from a place less than a kilometre from our house in town and that person phoned me angrily and asked why I hadn't confirmed my appointment nor shown up for it, after all it was a week ago they sent me the forms. The letter reached me the following day, meaning it had averaged 105m a day on its journey across town. 

And Now, one of their best SNAFUs

In one of those events that should happen once in a lifetime or less, I ordered some electronic hobby parts, some in late November ("shipment A") and then some more in early December ("shipment B") and . . . 

Waited. And waited. . .  

Then in mid March I asked the company, and they agreed, to resend the same order again ("shipment C") as it had obviously been lost in transit. 

In April, Shipment C arrived. Still no shipment B, mind you. But I decided to be patient for a week or two longer.

And then just as I was about to ask the company for a resend of Shipment B, it too arrived - after a mere 18 or so weeks in transit. But hey - I had all the parts for the project after almost five months so I could finally get cracking.

Then in late May, Shipment A showed up. . . 

I'd kept the wrappings with the tracking numbers on them because I wanted to keep the sender details and order numbers etc, and so I decided I'd phone Australia Post's service people. The representative I spoke to seemed to be Australian (okay, a grudging point awarded to AP for that) but very detached from reality. I asked if they kept a history of tracking numbers and he said they did, so I asked him about Shipment A. 

"Oh yes," he said, "that shipment got on an [airline Xyzzy] flight in China and then seems to have vanished." Oh boy. It "got on a plane in China" and then just - poofed. Vanished. Bloody cosmic rays. . . This guy wasn't backing down. I pointed out that if the thing got scanned ONTO a plane in China, no-one could have just thrown it out in flight, yes? 

He agreed, and I said ". . . and our airline cargo staff aren't all incompetent, are they?" and again got a "m'yup" out of him. 

"So where do you reckon it might have been lost then?" 

"Look, I told you it got on the plane in China and didn't arrive in Australia "

I gave up and asked him about Shipment B and he was right back on the ball:

"Tracking number . . . um . . . flibbetty-number-umpteen  . . . got from China to Australia and then - oh wow - it's no longer on the tracking system, perhaps it wasn't a conformant tracking number or something and got returned."

When I mentioned that I was reading those tracking numbers off of parcels that I was currently holding in my hand because they'd arrived, he spluttered a bit and said something long the lines of "Well I don't know how they could have gotten to you, they're not on any of our records" and when I told him that the Australia Post Postie had handed them to me out of his Australia Post post bag, he just muttered something and - hung up.

He couldn't deal with it and instead of doing the right thing and escalating it, he hung up. Such an ignorant prick I've never had to deal with before nor since. 

The best bit? I could see where Shipment A had been, it was received in Australia and then there was a postmark of someplace like the Seychelles a few weeks later, and finally another postmark when it was sent back to Australia in late April. The lovely folks at AP, hammered as the poor dears must have been at Christmas, kindly sent my parcel on an overseas holiday, perhaps to give themselves time, or were incompetent, or both and more. 

So

I ended up paying for two lots of Shipment A because I'm honest and I told the company the earlier order had arrived, they said maybe I should just keep it but I suggested they raise a second invoice or let me order it again and immediately mark it received, I've honeslty never heard anyone more surprised than the company rep I was speaking to. I still have Platinum customer status (or equivalent, I'm not going to give away which company this is) with them despite being thousands of dollars worth of trade short per year. 

Prior (dis)Engagements

From that episode back to 2011, I can remember vaguely that there were quite a few other incidents, the best of which was when we moved to a road not services by AP posties. We decided we'd like a PO box at the next major PO, they claimed they were out of PO boxes so we could get a free PO box at a little franchise outpost nearer to our street.

The franchise office turned out to be even worse than the official AP organisation and it caused 90% of the incidents including returning several items of redirected mail because they didn't have a clue and the address on the mail was "for some other place, how were we sposed to know?" - and they only got worse from there. At least a dozen, possibly up to twenty, incidents and failures, and we were only at that address for 14 months... I don't have time to list all that lot, but none of them have made it into this post because that one franchise PO alone would fill a post - and one day it might... 

Australia Post are an example of what happens when you don't appoint competent management - you end up like the LNP Coalition, and your company ends up as screwed as Australia currently is. . . .

Cheers.