Parcel Farce and Monitor Mayhem

10:23.37 - Wednesday 26th January 2005   (Link to This Entry)

God. F*cking. Dammit.

My monitor is coming from the US because it was actually cheaper to do that than get one locally. They take a wide range of voltages, 95-260v if I remember right, and I was assured it would work in the UK. I pay for the monitor and get no response to my insurance/despatch enquiries whatsoever for several days. When I finally get an email, it turns out I have to pay another £6 for insurance - unexpected but at least it gets the damned thing moving.

Then it arrives in the UK and goes straight into Customs. While it's there I happen to look at the Dell website and find they've very kindly dropped their flat-panel monitor prices by 20%, making them the same price I've just paid for one from the US. GAGH! So far I've only saved about a fiver but I'm not out of pocket, right?

Mr.Foo proceeds to scare me senseless by remembering that monitors with SVHS and Composite inputs are now liable for 14% Import Duty as well as 17.5% VAT, which would bump the price up by another £150 if I get stung for it, making it a bloody expensive purchase. After chancing a heart attack all day, I check the status and - glory be! - it has cleared Customs. It'll be here soon, right?

After screaming across the Atlantic via USPS, the package is handed over to... Parcel Farce. Oh my GOD. Visions of my monitor arriving in bits plague me ceaselessly, BootBlock teases me on MSN and I make plans for my compensation claim. Parcelforce don't have a very good reputation, in case you hadn't twigged.

I check the website and.. what's this? They tried to deliver it yesterday? At 12:14? While I was sat here waiting for it? I don't think so. In fact I bloody well know so - there isn't even a card to say they'd been here. I realise they've probably tried to deliver it to a neighbouring street which, because of a stupid bit of road layout, it often mistook for the other half of our street. "No problem" thinks I. "I'll go to the depot first thing!"

So my internal alarm clock woke up early this morning and was out of the bath, dried, dressed and into the car for 8am. I drove over to the Parcelfarce depot on the other side of the motorway and... found it was no longer there. It's turned into a packaging company or something. When the hell did THAT happen? I briefly debated driving all the way across town to the Post Office depot there, but since my house was on the way, I came back here instead.

Back on the Parcel Farce website I did a Track and Trace using the USPS code and - amazingly - that worked. That, too, showed that there had been a delivery attempt for my parcel and that it had been returned to the depot. In Lincoln. Forty bloody miles away. What the F...?

So I've asked for a redelivery, but I've sent them an email mentioning the possible wrong address as well since the redlivery form doesn't ask for a tracking code but the contact form after performing a Track & Trace does. No, I don't get it either. Of course, I can't get a redelivery until tomorrow now, unless I make the 80-mile round trip to pick the bloody thing up myself, and possibly pay a charge of 50p for my trouble.

What will happen tomorrow is anybody's guess. I personally think the same driver will try to delivery it to the same wrong address and it'll end up back in Lincoln again. Alternatively, it will be delivered the moment I save this entry, because they hate me. They're not known as Parcel Farce for nothing you know.

Update: Spoke to Parcel Farce on the phone and they still claim there was an attempted delivery, only now they're saying there's a charge on the package - bloody Import Duty. God only knows how much this is gonna cost me in the long run.