Rain, Snow, Sleet, and Gloom of Night Will Absolutely Stay These Postal Worker Union Snowflakes From Their Appointed Rounds

Our terrible, horrible, very scary "blocked" driveway.

I used to admire postmen. They brought the mail no matter what, right to your door or mailbox. And I still admire many of them and express my appreciation when they go that extra mile. They've gone dramatically downhill since postal workers got themselves a woman. Even then many of them continued to do their jobs above and beyond the call of duty and I respected them all for that.

That is, until we got a new post "person". It's not that she is a woman. Our two prior post persons were women and lovely people. I used to leave them little gifts at Christmas. If a package was too big for our oversized box, they would cheerfully run it up our pleasant tree-lined driveway (see above). It runs a quarter of a mile back into the woods and they would leave the package as the bottom of the stairs to our garage apartment at the very end of the lane. Then she'd drive on circling the house on the circular drive. No backing up. No difficult turns. The worst hazard she'd face was fat lazy deer in the road.

The first time this new gal brought a package to my house, she took one look up our driveway (above) and wrote down that the package was undeliverable because the front door of the driveway was blocked. This was an out and out lie. There were no fallen trees, no washouts, not even a pothole of any size. A big fat FedEx truck rolled up the drive just a day before to deliver a package to us. My two neighbors up here both are business people and with my wife and I both disabled seniors with no car depending on Amazon and Walmart delivery to deliver our stuff to us, there is a steady stream of FedEx, UPS, DSH, Amazon, Uber, Dominoes, Door Dash, and the disabled transport bus up this "inaccessible" driveway. We just laid down new gravel to fill any dips, bumps or potholes.

This guy gets up our drive every week.

But our snowflake postgal, the Amazing Kreskin, took our package back because she sensed that the road was blocked. Apparently she received some sort of premonition that it would be too difficult to get that 4 wheel drive jeep of hers down the lane. Now let me 'splain what happens when she does that.

1. My package is late, a day maybe two. You can't tell because the post office won't talk to me, they list the wrong phone number, the wrong post office and make you hang online for hours before a live person will talk you to. Then that very nice person files a case and gives you a number and tells you someone will call back. (Six day later, still waiting).
2. My package is taken to an undisclosed location and Amazon is informed that the package is "undeliverable". Meanwhile the USPS tracking number lists the package as "out for delivery" for the past week. 
3. Amazon won't give me a live person to talk to and apparently expects me to wait two to three days to be reimbursed, meanwhile reordering the item (an $11 watering can for my wife's flowers) to be redelivered.
4. Of course, if they redeliver it, that same postgal is going to refuse to deliver it again. This is the second time we have gone through this with her.
5. Last time I had to take an Uber to the post office ($15 plus tip and an hour waiting for the ride), wait another hour in line at the post office which they might or might not have, wait an hour for another Uber and another $15 plus tip to get back home.  Final Cost $15+$15+$11 plus the steep Washington State sales tax) = better than $41 for a watering can that lists for $11. 

Even this beast got down our driveway.

Our service and retail industries had to work hard to stay alive over the CoVid "pandemic". They had to kiss customer behind to keep people buying stuff from them. Now that the pandemic is almost over to the chagrin of the Democrat party, the big business boys seem to have decided they can start treating customers badly again.

More on the slow death of civility in a coming blog.

© 2022 by Tom King

It's About Time Delivery Drivers Stop Being Married to GPS

 THIS IS NOT MY HOUSE!

It's not even my stuff. I think it's someone else's stuff mixed up with mine and dumped alongside the road because it was after 10pm and the driver couldn't read directions and GPS lost my house 8 years ago. And she wanted to go home. Walmart says I can have my money back in 48 hours. Fat lot of good that does me.

I'm royally hacked off at a Door Dash driver named Mandy. My Walmart order was due between 9 and 10pm. It was late because the driver ignored clear written instructions because her GPS disagreed with them and assumed that I don't know where I live. 

GPS lost our house 8 years ago. Door Dash had a representative call me. I could barely understand her. English was not her native language. She told me I couldn't call the driver. She asked me if my mailbox number was 15123. I said no and told her the correct number, 13122, which was written on the delivery slip. 

The driver didn't call me. Instead she dumped my food in front of a row of mailboxes one of which had a few of my address numbers on it. She piled it all alongside the road in the dirt. I don't even know what road it's on. Walmart is going to refund my money in two days. Till then I don't have enough left in the bank to go ahead and reorder what I needed so we are stuck. Hope some hungry person finds the food.

My wife and I are both partially disabled and we don't have a car. So their delivery service is very important to us. I could tell from the Door Dash agent that the driver was mad at us. The agent hung up on me and I was being as polite as I could be. I did remove the driver's tip. 

Where do they get these people? I've had three similar incidents in the past 3 months where the driver apparently couldn't read written directions and got mad at ME for not being where GPS thought I ought to be. The picture above shows where they dropped it all off in the dirt on the side of the road. 

I look for it but I'm not sure where this is and it could be anywhere in a 6 block radius. It's late at night and we have coyotes roaming the neighborhood and car thieves coming down from Seattle because everyone is moving away from there to my neighborhood!

I tried calling Walmart, but they close at 11 and I got the picture above a half hour before closing time. None of the associates would pick up the phone. They too wanted to go home I guess.

Walmart has been a great help to us during all this CoVid hysteria. I just joined Walmart Plus to get their delivery service. I defend the leftists who attack Walmart and want us to go to rude Mom and Pop stores that charge us more money and are more inconvenient and less accessible to buy stuff. I'm a fan of Sam Walton's company.

Door Dash, however, has hired some wildly incompetent drivers. They need to do some training. Some of the guys are great and I always tip them well, but really. This is getting ridiculous. Someone needs to tell these snowflakes that sometimes the GPS is wrong and you have to use the phone or do some dead reckoning - use a little logic.

There are some smart ones. I had a young lady driver from Ranier Pizza who found us on her first attempt by seeing where the arrow pointed to our house in the middle of a wood showing no roads. She drove around two sides of the block, spotted our mailbox and took the one lane gravel driveway that leads all the way back to our house, turned right at the rock with 13122 painted on it and brought our pizza hot to the house. I tipped her handsomely. Sadly Ranier Pizza has closed. I liked their pizza and their driver.

It's a shame you can't request specific drivers. Some of the guys would have more calls than they could handle. Others would be out of work in days.

Well that's my rant. Sheila has to wait for a couple of days for the Rocky Road Ice Cream that is currently melting alongside the road somewhere in our rather large neighborhood.

© 2022 by Tom King

 

FedEx is No Longer the FedEx of "Castaway"

 

 I'm mad as all git-out and FedEx won't talk to me. I was supposed to have two packages delivered on December 9. The driver tagged it undeliverable and says my address doesn't exist.  He said it again the next day.  I called FedEx and got a live person with an accent who said she would note my package with my phone number and have the driver call. 

Next day, the tenth, no delivery. Rescheduled. The same thing happened on the eleventh, the twelfth, thirteenth, and now we're scheduled for the fourteenth and I have no confidence that it will be delivered this time.  

One of the packages is a gift for my grandson and needs to be shipped from my house to Texas. I can't send it to him until I get it here. I tried to talk to a real person or to have the packages held at a FedEx location, but now the website tells me every day that it will be delivered tomorrow. And it won't let me talk to a real person on the website or by phone. And FedEx keeps telling me the same thing day after day. This is not the FedEx that we saw in the movie "Castaway."  

If I could find their distribution facility, I would go and visit!  I am a peaceful man with occasional lapses. This could be the beginning of a beautiful lapse.

Shame on you FedEx. You'd think you'd become Democrats!

© 2020 by Tom King