It’s A Shame When The Only Gift Received Is A Lesson Learned

I recently had a very… interesting experience with a postal service.

Having a sudden inspiration for my wife’s birthday present, I ordered an item from a webshop. I received an email that the item would be delivered the next evening. So far, so good.

The next day, a Thursday, I received an email with the timeslot. My package was to be delivered between 5:30 pm and 10:30 pm. In other words, “somewhere in the evening”. Yeah, it’s a big timeslot and I was not too happy with that, especially since 10:30 pm is the time I want to go to sleep. On the other hand, a big timeslot usually means it arrives earlier than the final minute, so I was not too worried.

By 8:00 pm, however, I received another email. It said that the timeslot had changed to “between 8:05 pm and 10:30 pm”. Wow, breaking news… I mean, the passing of time would imply that you’re not going to make it IN THE PAST. So, what is the point of this email?

10:30 rolled by. Still nothing. My wife and I decided to go to sleep, pondering whether we would open the door if they came in late. But nothing happened.

The next morning, I saw another email from the postal service. Apparently, they hadn’t “managed” to deliver it. No explanation why or how, but at least they didn’t claim delivery while this wasn’t the case. (You often hear these horror stories.) Now they were gonna try again this evening, same d*** timeslot. Sigh!

Friday evening, same scenario, except with no email for the shorter timeslot at 8:00. So again, nothing. Grmbl… Now, I’m getting really annoyed.

Saturday morning. Another email, now from the webshop. Apparently, the postal service had still “failed to deliver” and now they had sent the package back to the webshop. As soon as the return was processed, I would receive my money back.

Not showing up two nights in a row is probably something logistic, but what really bugs me is that this resulted in them just giving up on the delivery so quickly — no attempt to send it to a nearby package point, either. Just… nothing. All of this was just a complete waste of time for me and a waste of time, energy, and fuel to them. All for a small package.

Although I considered complaining to them, I soon realised that their websites are designed to make this difficult, with stupid chatbots instead of real people, etcetera, which would only make the situation more frustrating to me. Instead, I’d better just take my hands off the situation and find a different present somewhere else — preferably not from a webshop, and certainly not this one. I don’t want to risk any of them working with this same dreadful delivery service.