Last week’s column about having to wait in for a
delivery company driver who never turned up (but claimed that they had), chimed
with lots of you. Unbelievably the exact
same thing happened two days later when the pick up of my parcel was
rescheduled.
This time the people at the Early Learning Centre
seemed to believe me and told me that they wouldn’t bother collecting their
faulty item and would send me a replacement as soon as possible. They’d been
let down by their delivery service.
I am a persistent kind of person. You know the popular
phrase, “persistence of a herring”, that is named after me (admittedly it’s a
phrase that I made up and am trying to popularise and no one is really joining
in, but that won’t stop me).
I wanted to find out why I had had my time wasted twice,
as much for all the people who’ve experienced the same treatment and had no
recourse to get their complaints heard, as for myself.
What had made the driver say they had tried to collect
my package when they hadn’t even rung my doorbell? I was going to be like a
proper journalist. This could be my Watergate.
The company turned out to be Yodel, which if my
Twitter feed is anything to go by, will not be a surprise to many of you. When
I mentioned them I got dozens of tweets telling me stories of Yodel informing
people they’d been out when they’d been in, or customers finding their package
in the bin (which is a safe space with a bit of jeopardy, one day out of seven
you’d lost it, like a game of pass the parcel crossed with Russian Roulette) or
having boxes of electronic equipment thrown over fences into gardens.
I did ask for any positive stories about the company
from my 182,000 Twitter followers and one man said he’d never had any trouble
with them and a driver had once waited at the door for two minutes in the
pouring rain. So not all bad.
Despite probing no one seemed able to tell me why the
driver had claimed I was out when I wasn’t. There were lots of possibilities.
They might have had the wrong address. Or be lying. Or all the other
possibilities.
If I had had to make a prejudiced guess about what had
happened I would say that the delivery driver was running late, realised that
my house would take them too far out of their way and had decided to pretend
they’d tried to collect the package. To do this twice was audacious, though
possibly it was two different drivers.
But it’s too easy to blame the employee. You have to
ask why so many people have stories like this. Why do the drivers lie? Because
they weren’t being paid enough for each delivery? Because they are penalised by
their employee if they are late? I have no idea what the answer is, but it’s
hard to think of a reason that so many drivers would just make stuff like this up,
unless their employers gave them no real choice.
I informed Yodel I was going to write about this and
gave them a couple of days to comment before my deadline. But they failed to
deliver on time. Maybe next week. If I am in.
But kudos to them. It didn’t matter to them that I was
a newspaper columnist writing about their business. They treated me just like
any other customer. With minimal respect or interest. And they must be
applauded for that.
Comedians can be a competitive bunch at times, but this
weekend every stand-up in the country was united in joy over the success of the
absolutely lovely stalwart veteran, Davey Johns. He is the star of the Ken
Loach film “I Daniel Blake” which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes.
Not bad Davey, but I’ve got a Chortle Award, so you’ve still got a long
way to go to catch up.
