What can Brown do for me?Follow

They can go **** themselves is what they can do.

So I have been knowing for a while that my mortgage company was going to be sending me some documents I needed to sign and send back in order to finish the refinancing process on my condo. They told me they couldn't say for certain when the documents would be coming out as they were waiting for word back from the actual money man as to the final figures on a new rate and whatnot.

Well, when I got home from the store on Saturday, there was the UPS envelope sitting on my porch. I had a couple of things to do, so I didn't get to open it right away. When I finally opened it on Sunday, I found the documents the mortgage company had sent to me...On March 24!!! I was livid. The documents sent supposed to be signed and returned and I was supposed to start making my new payments on April 1. Kind of tough to do that when UPS takes 4 weeks to deliver a package that I can only assume was supposed to get to me in 4 days (or less).

I don't ship things very often, but you can bet when I do so in the future, it won't be by UPS.

As long as we can all agree that that was probably the single worst slogan a company has ever used, we'll all get along just fine.

I've always found UPS to be quite prompt. I'd be more suspicious of your mortgage/refinancing people. Besides, if your mortgage company had sent you papers a month ago, why has no one questioned their where-abouts until now?

You can probably track when UPS got the package for delivery.

I searched the outside of the UPS package and couldn't find anything indicating a pickup date. I honestly didn't think of going to their website and doing the track and confirm thing.

I called the mortgage company just now and my loan specialist admitted they were drawn up on March 24 but weren't sent until around April 17, so I guess I owe UPS an apology.

It's a shame too, I was looking forward to being good and angry at somebody.

Not really as I had no time frame for when they would send the docs. What got me mad was seeing the date of March 24 on the cover letter and I received them on April 21. I'll just have to swallow my anger for now so it will be even more burninating the next time.

I used to work delivery for UPS part time during their holiday rush. Items like that are supposed to be flagged as needing a signature, and there's a pretty detailed policy for what can and can't be left outside a house, and where to leave it. I don't know much about the inner workings of the company, but if an item were to get stolen, it's easy to figure out who did the delivery, so there's at least a decent amount of accountability.

We used to come by the same places two and three times a day, leaving notes about when we'd be by again, trying to catch a person when they were home. We were pretty thorough about things. Dunno if we were atypical, but I've generally heard that UPS has a pretty good reputation.

So you're not going to be penalized in any way for not making a payment on April 2?

No, my rep told me she would put a note in that the documents weren't sent and the first payment would not be due until May 1 and there wouldn't be any penalties. As I said, throughout the process they have been very helpful and this is just another example of that. Although it probably would have been more helpful to send the documents out in a more timely fashion.

Only had a couple of problems with UPS. The company I work for periodically hands out rewards for various things. I've gotten a number of them over the years. You get to pick from a list of mostly kinda basic stuff. It's not a huge deal, and I'll usually find something that I wouldn't buy normally, but that might be useful for some reason. The last one was back right after we had that big power outage and one of the items was an electric lantern, so I figured that was a good choice (I think I wrote about the candles I had and the amusing side effect of using them). It shipped, but never arrived. I suppose I should probably have tracked it down, but I was super busy at the time, so I just blew it off. No clue what happened with that, but that's the only item that's just never showed up. I'm not going to lose sleep over a $30 electric lantern though.

The other odd occasion had nothing to do with me directly. I got a notice from UPS that they'd attempted to deliver something, but I wasn't there. Strange, since I wasn't expecting anything (unless it was that missing lantern. Hmmm...). Anyway, I look at the notice and it's got a different address. Same unit number, but different street address. Which means it's in a different condo complex. I figure the delivery person will figure this out tomorrow and find the correct address. Well, next day, there's another notice. Same wrong address, but with a warning like "this is the second attempt; one more and we send it back" attached. Being the nice guy I am, I decide to let UPS know that somehow their drivers are consistently failing to read the four big numbers that are right above my door that should be a huge clue that they're in the wrong place. The call was "interesting" in that apparently, their stock process doesn't allow for this sort of thing. I call and they ask for a delivery number. I give it to them and explain that their driver keeps trying to deliver this to my home, but this is the wrong address. She then wants to know my address and phone number so she can correlate the package to me. I explain again that this isn't going to help, since it's not my name or my address on the package. The driver is trying to drop it off at the wrong location. Finally, this sinks in and she says she'll talk to the driver.

I didn't get another notice the next day, so hopefully whoever that was got their package. I'm still mystified as to how the driver manage to deliver to the wrong place two days in a row. I have to assume it was the same person and he/she just went to where they went yesterday and didn't double check anything. It just seems strange because I know that when I go somewhere and the person I'm meeting isn't there, my first thought is to make sure I'm in the right place. You'd also think that people who's job is to deliver stuff to addresses would become reasonably good at it. I get that this can sometimes be difficult, especially when dealing with multi-unit complexes, but in my complex each block of units has their own street address and each unit has its own number (the numbers don't repeat through the whole complex though, so it should be really really easy to find the right one). The street address number for my block of units is on the side of the balcony right above my door. Literally as you walk up to my door, if you look up you'll see it. You can easily see it driving around the complex, so I'm not sure how a delivery person could miss it, not once, but twice.


Other than that, no complaints.

I like seeing the Amazon.com commercial, where they leave a small Amazon box containing a new Kindle Fire sitting on the front stoop of what looks like downtown San Fransisco. Something like that just seems like it's asking to be stolen.

I live in an very low populated area, few and far in between, and I still don't like that they leave stuff on my front porch. I work right next to the local UPS distribution center, seems better if they'd just say "You weren't home, please contact us." I'd just stop by on my way home from work and grab it myself.

HP has a contract with UPS to handle all their parts shipping, for service and repair etc., so I usually order parts to be shipped to whatever location needs them. Problem is some of these podunk towns don't see UPS until two or three in the afternoon and it can really kill my schedule. So I started having the parts held at a shipping center which happens to be near my home and they arrive by nine in the morning; I can call them up and go over and pick up my shit whenever, but they're not very accomodating. There's static on our phones; I can't hear you; we're in a conference with the regional directors and nobody can leave for an hour, etc.

Haven't they changed it to that "logistics" *********

I think UPS is pretty cool from a shipper's perspective, better than FedEx at the least. Our driver is cool, he's on time and patient with us even if we aren't. My one gripe is that their shipping software is one of the buggiest pieces of **** I've ever had the displeasure of working with. It regularly forgets settings, sends false pick-up requests, and crashes near constantly. Apart from that I really do like the company as a whole.