DPD – delivery service from hell. Richer Sounds fail.

Thanks, DPD. I have been waiting at home for eight hours having taken the day off work, sitting in my home office watching the road, when what do I spy, a DPD delivery van driving past my house with your driver clutching something in the air inside the van. A GPS unit, I wonder. Are you lost? Should I run out and flag you down? Then the van drives off. Oh well, I think. A coincidence. Must have been a different driver with a different parcel.

Then, five minutes later I get an e-mail with this message . . .

“Sorry, we were unable to deliver your parcel as there was no one present to sign for the delivery; we left calling card number.”

And I twig what’s really going on. Too busy to stop and deliver. Paid shit wages and on a schedule, so drives past, takes photo of my house, makes no attempt to stop and knock because that’s five minutes his overworked arse can’t afford to spend.

Well, here’s a message back for DPD. Your driver didn’t try to stop. He didn’t even leave the calling card message – that was as &^%%$%^& fictional as my delivery. But I have wasted my entire day waiting for somebody who seems to think their job is to take a digital photo of my house and sod off.

Note to Richer Sounds and anyone else thinking of using DPD to deliver your products – find a delivery service that aren’t employing what look to me like underpaid, overworked drivers.

Find a delivery service where the company thinks their job is something more than wasting a day for a self-employed worker, depriving him of a day’s income, and taking a picture of my house to e-mail to me as supposed proof I’m not in.

Update 1 – Misery Loves Company: Check out hashtag #DPD_UK on Twitter or read the comments section below any post at https://www.facebook.com/dpd.uk – hundreds of angry comments from fuming DPD UK customers in the same boat as me. Multiple missed deliveries by DPD and customers at the end of their rag.

Richer Sounds are now going to get the delivery sent directly to one of their stores to redeliver to me via their own staff, which is a nice save by them (the chain store has a very good recommendation by Which Magazine for customer service, which is why I used them).

But %^$& me, what a palaver. We can land a space probe on a comet millions of miles away, but getting a package delivered by DPD – aka GeoPost UK Limited – means missing a day’s pay, wasting the day, and the courier firm equivalent of dealing with the Keystone Cops. I’ll have to watch out for one of the DPD drivers getting out the van, the doors falling off, and giving his red nose a tweak. Honk honk.

Is it just me, or is 21st century existence turning into an Apple-branded version of Brazil, the 1985 film directed and written by Terry Gilliam? Technology that doesn’t work half the time, is too complicated to use the rest of the time (and is upgraded weekly with a new interface if you try), layers of bureaucracy, and where a call to your utility company of choice (or any other organisation) to sort out any issue you care to mention becomes a Kafkaesque journey towards a drooling, rambling Colonel Walter E. Kurtz at the other end of the tunnel? Is this how the world ends, my son? Not with a bang. But with a million tiny requests to fill out a form on a non-existent web page using a mobile browser that no longer supports the non-depreciated form of Flash.

I’m either getting old, or the world is getting seriously %$£^&*. Maybe both at the same time?

Is this how the world ends, my son? Not with a bang. But with a million tiny requests to fill out a form on a non-existent web page using a mobile browser that no longer supports the non-depreciated form of Flash.