On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 1:44 PM, William Robb <[email protected]> wrote: > So, I took a day off work to wait for a shipment from B&H Photo. A beauty > dish and a couple of grids for my studio lights. > Promised delivery was today, hence my taking a day from work. > So, the parcels missed the Fed/Ex truck this morning, and so my equipment is > sitting at their local facitiy, about a 10 minute drive from my house. > I called Fed/Ex to see if I could just pick the stuff up myself, thereby > saving them the trouble of delivery, and to let me get on with my day. > It turns out they can't do that. > They have to have a failed delivery attempt prior to being able to allow a > customer pick-up, but they won't be attempting a delivery now until Monday. > They did give me the option of calling the shipper to see if they would > change the delivery method to allow me to pick up the gear. > B&H, unfortunately, has no way (at least so they say) of changing the > delivery option, since they have no authority over how Fed/Ex does business. > > I think I'll dig out my copy of Catch-22 and give it a read. > > It could be worse, I could have chosen UPS. > > So it goes.
Reminds me of the time that I received an eBay "attempted delivery" slip from either UPS or Fedex (doesn't matter which, it was one of them). I lived alone in an apartment and worked full time, so I asked if it could be delivered one evening or on the weekend. Nope. I asked if I could authorize them to leave it outside my door ~at my risk~. Nope. I asked, "Well, what are my options?" "You can come up to our warehouse to pick it up," I was told. I was told their warehouse was in Concord, about 30 miles north of here, and I didn't have a car and public transit didn't go there. I told them I couldn't make it up there. The item would be returned to the sender if I didn't pick it up in however many business days, I was told. "I have no way of getting up there, so you might as well send it back now," I said. A couple of weeks later I received a letter in the mail. It was a bill from the courier company as I'd "refused" shipment! The bill included shipping, plus a brokerage fee and duty, and it was for about $75. This for an old Minolta HiMatic rangefinder that I'd bought for $12 on eBay! I sent them a lovely letter in return, explaining that (a) I didn't refuse delivery, they were simply unable to deliver it to me and (b) I had no contract with them, the shipper did, and I was in no way liable for any costs that they incurred in shipping this item. I never heard from them again. cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
