Called UPS to see where the gazebo might be. When I’d entered the tracking number into the website, I was warned that there was an exception attached to my order. There was no explanation. Just: exception. Googled the term; first hit was on a message board devoted to steroids. The poster appeared to be worried that someone had intercepted the package, and was advised by others to clean out the house. That doesn’t seem to apply here. I don’t think I’m running afoul of Federal interstate gazebo-laws. A little more research suggested that it’s a catch-all term for “Things not going exactly as planned, and never you mind why, litlte mister.” Since the gazebo had made it from its Texas birth through Kansas up to Eagan, I figured I might discuss the matter with a real person.
If such a thing existed.
It took more googling to find out how to get a UPS customer service rep. You have to ask for one when you’re given the chance to say what you need, and you have to use the right words – O Brown, cast down Thine Eyes Upon my Case and Lift the cup of Exception From My Lips, and then you enter a melody in the plagal node using your numeric pad, then wait. Eventually I got a person, and she asked for all the info.
“There’s an exception,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “What does that mean?”
“I can’t tell. But I’m not showing any movement on the package since the 29th.”
I filed that metaphor away for old age, when constipation becomes an issue. “Yes. What could that mean?” I realized it was a foolish question, and I’d asked it twice, but I really did want to hear someone say it was possible they lost a 10-foot tall box that weighed 147 pounds.
“I can’t tell. You’ll have to contact the vendor and put a trace on it.”
Hold on. Wait up. Tarry here a moment, my boon companion. Why would I call the vendor? You have it.
“They’re the only one that can put a trace on it.”
Unaware I was speaking with the Delphi Oracle, I persisted: Why? I’m looking at the route; they gave it to you two weeks ago. It made it all the way up to the Eagan warehouse, and then winked out of this plane of existence, perhaps leaving the dissonant fragrance of a unicorn fart. What could they possibly be able to do that you can’t?”
We went on like that for a while. I didn’t want a solution, I just wanted an explanation.
Getting none, I called Amazon. Busy. Kept dialing; got through; a nice cheerful lass said hello, and I said I’d ordered a gazebo through Target.com using my Amazon.com account, and UPS lost it, and said they had to put a trace.
“Oh gosh,” she said, in a tone that said “First day on the bomb-defusing squad.” She plowed through my records. Found no gazebo.
“I see a West Fargo address,” she said.
What? Oh no. NO. “That’s my sister – I have it in my account for gifts. It didn’t go there, did it?”
“No, I’m in Grand Forks,” she chirped. “Go North Dakota!”
I asked her if she could access my Target.com orders made through Amazon, and she realized she hadn’t heard my earlier comment. (Honestly, I did say it.) She said I’d have to talk to Target.com, and connected me. The phone was answered by Cr is o er, which is how “Christopher” sounds when the connection drops out every half second. I think he knew what I was talking about. He promised to have it there tomorrow, or another would be sent out overnight.
So apparently Target.com has a special satellite they can use to look through roofs and find the box in a warehouse far below, and then they use a tractor beam to deliver it.
Either that, or Target calls UPS and says “hello, we’re looking for a big box about yea long, yea high – could you go in the back where you keep the stuff that hasn’t been delivered for no particular reason, and see if you have it? Sure, I’ll hold. . . . .You have it? Great! Why wasn’t it delivered? Oh, I see. Yeah, it is heavy. I’d pretend it didn’t exist, either. Okay, thanks. Bye.”
It won’t be here tomorrow, I suspect. That’s when I call Target and tell them to send another, but don’t overnight it. Eat the shipping and I’ll be happy.
Curious Lucre and Lance Lawson today, and 100 Mysteries on Friday. Lance is up now. If you only stopped by yesterday morning you missed the out-of-context ad contest and the Mpls update. Enjoy! See you around.
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45 Responses to Thursday, May 07
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IS that the Gazebo in the picture? If so, sir, we share the same model.
Please note, if you don’t bolt it down, you can pour sand or dry concrete into the hollow posts to keep it in place.
It has stayed steady through wind storms where our other Target Gazebos had not. This will be our last. The replacement will be a permanent structure. Home away from home as it were, Er, by about a third of an acre.
My Wife grew up in Egan – should I have her make a few calls?
I have had to do this for a living from time to time. Keep pressing the “0″ button when UPS wants you to speak into the phone it will eventually take you to an operator, usually after two presses.
I work for UPS as a package handler in northern Calif. Your gazebo probably got damaged in shipment, parts fell out, etc., and is being held at the Eagan center until the extent of damage can be accessed. So my guess it’s tied up in a back-and-forth with Target and UPS to see if it’s salvageable.
This thing happens once in a while, especially when heavy items are thinly packaged in cardboard with straps to save money. It’s cheaper to lose a couple shipments here and there rather than spend more on wooden crates.
I’ve experience a few UPS “exceptions”. You can tell the tracking system was written by a Comp. Sci. person. Computers no longer have “errors”, they have “exceptions”. anyway the exception I experienced was I wasn’t at home to sign for the thing. Had to go up to the depot and sign for it. The orange and brown slip they left for me to sign must have had an exception and was blown away by the wind.
Of course it doesn’t have an “error”. “error” means that there’s a PROBLEM. Customers hear “problem” and they get all woogly and do crazy things like going to the competition. That’s why we have “exceptions” now.
check to see if they have a customer counter at the Eagan location (we can’t have all the fun alone at Broadway and Industrial.) if so, drive in, wave the tracking number, ask them to bring it out.
you can call Target.com on the phone while there, right? go speaker and get everybody in on the party?
you could even wear your steenkin’ badge if you happened to only have time after a trip to the office, I should think, without getting into hot water, as a Professional Journalist Following Up A Tip ™.
“I don’t think I’m running afoul of Federal interstate gazebo-laws.”
Ha. After Lance gets through with you, you’ll be heading to Ol’ Sparky for first degree Doris razzing.
So the warehouse they stuffed the Ark in is in Egan, MN, eh? We’re getting it narrowed down, folks.
Yes, there’s a customer counter there. I’ve had to go there a few times to pick things up myself. Amazon, for whatever reason, occasionally ships my book or DVD orders UPS instead of USPS. I’ve never figured out why. And, of course, I’m never home when they try to deliver them.
But it gives me a good excuse to go to the nearby Genghis Grill afterwards for dinner.
Exceptional service. I’m surprised that Amazon wasn’t more helpful. I usually have pretty good luck with them.
Bookworm Says:
May 7th, 2009 at 11:58 am
“…Amazon, for whatever reason, occasionally ships my book or DVD orders UPS instead of USPS. I’ve never figured out why. And, of course, I’m never home when they try to deliver them.”
Well, they obviously want their customers to have the most exceptional purchasing experience possible.
To get an actual person on the phone at UPS, just keep repeating “agent”.
You have my sympathies. I deal with several freight carriers with billing/delivery issues, and UPS is the one the one that’s the most miserable to deal with (but DHL is making a run on them).
You learn most about a company’s true commitment to quality by how they handle things that go wrong.
“exceptional” – har!
Since I write computer code for a living, I hadn’t even realized that “exception” is an unusual word for “we have a problem”. I guess it is, but I am sadly used to it.
I have that same gazebo model, too. Third year on it, in a very windy area. There are a few patches on the canvas, but it hangs in there. Flipped on its side once (what a crash on the wood deck) but was almost undamaged.
I picked mine up at Target – they enlisted every teen-age employee in the store to help wrestle it into my vehicle. At my end, I did what I always do – unpack the box in the car and carry it in a piece or two at a time.
“UPS is the one the one that’s the most miserable to deal with (but DHL is making a run on them)”
Maybe it’s just my part of the country, but I will take UPS over DHL any day. I cringe when I see DHL is my shipper -especially for something valuable or fragile. They once left a new Dell Computer, unsigned for, sitting on my front porch in the rain. I get something by UPS almost every week, and I can’t remember the last problem.
wonder if the “exception” is there is an empty box there after a couple of folks took an early day off?
Do you think she had any idea that the statement “not seeing any movement on the package” could be taken that way?
I have dealt with all of the shipping agents at one point or another, and the only one I’ve had prob…er, exceptions with was Fed-Ex. I had shipped via Fed-Ex hundreds of times and a few times came up with exceptions. Usually the exceptions turned out to be wrong addressee info, or the package somehow became damaged (probably used it to play baseball with – it was a Fed-Ex tube or bag filled with rolled-up road construction plans), or some such nonsense.
“‘I can’t tell. But I’m not showing any movement on the package since the 29th.’
“I filed that metaphor away for old age, when constipation becomes an issue.”
I had a few people at work come over and ask if I was OK when I choked on my tea over that.
ahh, the days of the National Lampoon and their (Nixon) White House Tapes album.
“Here is a list of the President’s movements for the week.
“Monday, nothing.
“Tuesday, nothing.
“Wednesday, good one, some blood.”
(click, hiss of changing channels)
We never had any problems with UPS until they recently switched drivers in our neighborhood. The new guy doesn’t seem to understand that the numbers on the address label have to match the numbers over our door. He keeps bringing boxes to our neighbor, because the neighbor and my husband have the same first name. It’s irritating, but I kind of feel sorry for him. If you can’t even deliver a box to the right house, what chance do you have in life?
We had several problems with cable about a month ago and their infernal phonetree (our local monopoly is the one that tries to adjectivize its name). The magic bean to get in touch with a reasonable facsimile of a real person in their system is to call, listen to the entire list of irrelevant options, hang up and call back immediately. I’m going to try that trick on other phonetrees too.
The magic word is “representative”. When the robot starts talking to you, just ignore what it says and chant “representative” at every pause. (The only exception is if it asks you if you want to ship a package. Just say “no” whether you do or not.)
This works for both UPS and FedEx. I run a little pack-and-ship store, and have to do that fairly often. No doubt, as the word gets out and more and more people do that, they’ll change the system. The very idea of having an actual human being answering the phone gives Executives™ heartburn.
As for “exceptions” — you should realize that once the package is scanned by the pickup driver it ceases to exist as far as the shipping company is concerned. There is the Tracking Number, and only the Tracking Number. Barcode scanners read the Tracking Number, and the computer system then decides where it should be next. If the Tracking Number is not read at the predicted point the computer declares an Exception, and the system comes to a halt as regards that Tracking Number. If a heavy package is label side down, the barcode scanner doesn’t see the barcode. Exception! At that point there is no package. The forklift driver can see it, the truck driver can see it, you know it’s there, but its number has disappeared from the computer system and therefore from the Ken of Mankind.
You, as the person who paid for the item, have no part in the process. Only the original shipper — the “sender” — can apply for a trace, or for a refund or insurance settlement. It may be worthwhile to try that, but your best bet is to get them to send you another one while they fight the bureaucracy and its computer support. Maybe the next one will be right-side-up when it goes through the scanner(s).
Eventually the shipping company will pile all the unclaimed packages outside and sell them off as “unclaimed freight”.
Regards,
Ric
Do people still say…er…write…”LOL!”? Prob’ly not, but i am…LOL!…Tory
I thought DHL only did international now.
I like FedEx ground.
“To get an actual person on the phone at UPS, just keep repeating ‘agent’.”
Yes, I acknowledge this, however– it is acceptable to me to talk INTO a machine, but I resent talking TO a machine. I think that, as we have given in to the foul phonetrees, we have bowed our humanity in submission.
What I find often works is hitting the ’0′ button, oh, about 37 times in 12 seconds.
I think “dissonant fragrance” is a bit of a mixed metaphor, but nevermind, I kind of like it.
My husband has used the extreme profanity method of getting to a real person… when pressing “0″, or saying “agent”, hasn’t worked. In frustration he has let fly some colorful language and lo and behold is transferred to a live person right quick…
yep, I do well hitting the 0 key until my finger is stiff, listening to see if the robot is still droning on, and if so, keep hitting it. over and over and over again like a machine-gun mowing down all the little hooks in the VRU submenu diagram on a whiteboard in a long-abandoned conference room.
back and forth, raking over the dead-ends and “this option is not valid”s, beeping out any trace of the endless maze that either ends up where you started, or the system hangs up on you because “you have reached the end of the menu, goodbye!”
firing at the stupidity of suits with a tin desk and a telephone who think walling off the customers is good business.
until I finally get a “click” — “Hello, this is Esmeralda, how may we –” and the battery on the cell goes dead.
This reminds of the time not too long ago when my wife went to the UPS website to track a package, and when she entered the tracking number, the package’s most recent status update said “TRAIN DERAILMENT.” We both Googled for news about a train wreck in the city that was listed, but we never found anything. Must not have been too bad, because the package arrived a day or two later.
The string is the most fun I’ve had all day.
hpoulter, we do the same thing when we get home with something heavy or bulky. That’s why we don’t work muscling merchandise in a discount store.
Living as I do 2 miles past the sticks in the Colorado mountains I have had many dealings with the UPS and FedEx. Regularly I do not get packages as scheduled due to poor weather, lazy drivers or other capricious acts of the Gods.
Pushing “0″ a few dozen times was always the best way to get someone’s attention. But now, I have the local dispatch center’s direct phone numbers; for both UPS and FedEx. The day I am expecting a package I will call the dispatch center to find out if the package is being delivered as promised. All packages have been delivered since I started this routine.
Dave Says:
May 7th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
This reminds of the time not too long ago when my wife went to the UPS website to track a package, and when she entered the tracking number, the package’s most recent status update said “TRAIN DERAILMENT.
I’m curious as to what other type of status updates they have. Like “Apocalypse”, or some other mayhem: “It says here the last status update was ARRIVED ROCKLIN CA @ 8:36 ‘APOCALYPSE’ so I guess it might be here tomorrow instead of this afternoon”.
Who wants to see movement on their package?
movement of the package? man, that’s the best part! woo!
James, did you really say “unicorn fart” to that lovely service rep?
I realize this comment is coming late in the day, so few will probably see it, and since I’m adding a link to the interwebs it’ll have to wait to be approved, but I think it’s worth posting anyway. Somebody sent me this website years ago, and I highly recommend it any time you need to talk to a human being when calling customer disservice: http://www.gethuman.com/us/
If only I had ordered my Colt 45 ammo from Target.com, I might have it by now…
What if Franz Kafka were alive today? And what if he had ordered something over the web that went bad, man? Imagine the grist for the mill of his cretive juices.
I mean, Mr. Kafka orders a gazebo, and they (eventually) deliver a one hundred forty seven pound cockroach.
the gethuman link is very, very useful. highly recommended
You actually found a way to talk to a fer-real person at Amazon?!? I don’t believe it. You’re either making that up or you’re dreaming again.
Or maybe this is something new they’re trying. I gave up on Amazon a few years ago, when they double billed my credit card. The only way I could find to contact them was email. They told me, via email, that I just didn’t know how to read my statement. Contested the charge with my bank, a wrote letters to every physical address for Amazon that I could find. One musta finally gotten through, the charge was eventually reversed. No explanation or apology. Been a happy B&N customer ever since!
UPS has lied to me and said a delivery was attempted when it wasn’t, that a delivery would be made after normal delivery hours, etc. But that was only once. Most of the time they were okay, much better than DHL.
Somewhere I have a picture of a large cardboard box DHL left leaning against the front door of a sorority house my organization used to rent for the summer. The door had a 12 X 15 inch sign on it (about two feet above the top of the box) reading “THIS DOOR IS NOT IN USE. PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE DELIVERIES AT THIS DOOR. TAKE THEM TO THE KITCHEN DOOR ON THE NORTH SIDE OF THE HOUSE [arrow pointing north] AND THE COOK WILL SIGN FOR THEM.”
I later posted a hand-written addendum reading “DHL: THIS WOULD INCLUDE YOU” which seemed to do the trick. “Oh! By ‘deliveries’ they meant things being delivered, like boxes! Well, they should have explained it better the first time.”
_@_v – sweet… ups slug just left me a garden gazebo and i didn’t even order one!
That’s a Sultan’s tent not a gazebo.
I never used to have trouble with UPS, but since the start of this year, several deliveries have ended up back at the retailer. They claim all 3 attempts were made, but there were never any post-its and I sleep a few feet from a fire-alarm-loud door buzzer(which never went off). So, either the driver for my area(supposedly the same guy as last year, who was excellent) has had a serious head wound & some sort of number aphasia that only affects addresses, or they lie like a rug.
Lately, I’ve been insisting on USPS, who can’t be bothered to do more than leave a pick-up notice(except when I got stamps, & then the genius left them, neither packaged nor labeled w/my name, just sitting atop the mailboxes, where they rapidly evolved legs)–much simpler to go get them myself from the PO.
The only major trouble I had with any of the big three was when I signed up with the local major monopoly phone company for DSL Internet. They were supposed to send me the installation package, but it never arrived. They said they showed it having been received and signed for, but there was no indication where it was delivered. I asked them to send another one, free of charge. They did, and when it was delivered, there was a note on my apartment door indicating that it was left at the main office of the apartment complex I lived in. The first time there was no note, neither from UPS or from the apartment complex main office.
When I worked in the satellite office close to home, I would sign for most, if not all, deliveries from any of the three companies. I got irritated with them giving the package to someone else and then that person giving it to me, then me giving it to whoever it goes to that I made a sign featuring the logos of UPS, Fed-Ex, and DHL to bring all deliveries to me, third office on the left. It worked great. The real reason why I did that was because I had ordered a lot of stuff last year from Amazon, and I preferred them to deliver directly to me, rather than give to someone else. I’m picky that way.
Huh. The front desk just called me, saying I had a BIG package delivered via UPS from Target. How in the heck am I going to fit this thing into my little Ford Focus? May have to borrow a company truck for the weekend. That, and find room in the little swatch of backyard we have. Looks like my weekend’s cut out for me.