Monday, August 13, 2012

What can Brown do for you?

What can brown do for you? So goes UPS's slogan. The answer is, as the color suggests, shit. Take my case today: the estimated delivery time was before 10:30am and the actual time the guy showed up was 5:17pm! Of course no one was home by then. So I submitted a request to hold the package at the facility for pick-up. Then I thought maybe it would be better to have the package delivered to my doorman'ed building. The UPS website happily allowed me to enter the new address and my credit card information (for the $5 charge to change delivery address), and then apologized that it could not process my request, without giving any reason whatsoever. I called UPS customer service. Its automatic answering system gave me a list of options, none of which was what I wanted. So I said "what the fuck!". The dumb system surprisingly sensed my frustration and apologized for not understanding my choice, and repeated the same list of options. I took half a minute trying to decide whether to give up, at which point the system said "to speak with an agent, say agent". The agent was slightly more intelligent than UPS's website and its automatic answering machine, but only slightly. The fault, she explained, was my own, as I had already submitted a request to hold the package, thus I would not be allowed to submit yet a different request. It's unbelievable that a company like UPS should have such a poorly designed IT system. What can brown do for you? A ton of shit!