Comments on: Apple is cool, but their partners are not

By: under promise, over deliver — code to customer — ruby on rails web developers from new zealand

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:38:21 +0000

[...] So we headed on over to the (somewhat confusing) TNT shipment tracker, and refreshed every couple of hours. Fingers were crossed that we wouldn’t share Lance’s TNT experience. [...]

By: lance

lance — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:38:12 +0000

and finally – it arrived. I received 2 phone call in the morning – one from the anxious guy and another calmer one 30 minutes before it arrived from a very nice woman. Apparently the chap that delivered was also a nice guy.

What was in the parcel?
A 1TB Time Capsule, a clock radio ipod speaker thing and a mouse.

I got anxious because I knew karma was working against me for that Time Capsule – the longer it took the more likely the prospect of a catastrophic failure in a computer (3 – 2 mine, 1 my cousin’s) that was to be backed up.

By: lance

lance — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:14:37 +0000

whew – I just fielded a pretty aggressive phone call from the local depot guys. I guess he didn’t like bing told that he had to call..

Nice enough bloke but as frustrated as I am it seems. At least I was able to suggest that the deliverer use the doorbell and so forth.

By: Bill Bennett

Bill Bennett — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:54:40 +0000

You’re spot on about the Kafkaesque experience of dealing with courier companies. But it sin’t just the technology, the rot goes right the way through.

During my time in Australia I had a ground floor home office next to the front door. I’ve sat at my desk and watched a courier drive up to the door, not knock at all, but place a card under the door. When I opened the door and confronted the courier, it turned out he didn’t have the package referred to on the card but had already lodged it at my local post office for me to collect. I asked him to drive back to the post office and bring me the package, but for some reason this wasn’t allowed.

I phoned the courier company to complain and went through six rings of voice mail hell before getting hold of someone who would listen — even then I was made to feel like I was being unreasonable.