Rant

I like UPS because the workers have a union, they take care of their drivers, and it seems like USPS is having some problems lately, which makes sense because the people in charge of it are actively trying to destroy it along with everything else.

So, I tried out UPS recently. It costs a little more but whatever.

I tried to ship a package to Canada. In addition to the tariffs, which are fun, UPS tacked on a "customs brokerage fee" which they attempted to charge to the recipient. Basically, as long as that person is paying tax and tariffs and God knows what else, we might as well collect $17.95 from them at the same time, because why not.

The person receiving the package told the UPS driver more or less "Get fucked, I'm not paying that. I'm not the one shipping the package, getting it to me is your problem not mine." I can sympathize. He said that he's had experience with doing that before, and the delivery company caved and he eventually got the package anyway. IDK what that's about, it sounds unlikely, but that's what he said.

Anyway, I talked with him, and eventually he agreed to pay this bullshit. I have spent half the morning at this point on the phone with UPS trying to get them to attempt redelivery of the package.

Actually, before that, when I was trying to sort everything out, I had some fun conversations where they explained this "customs brokerage fee" to me. I asked the guy several times if any other carrier charges this fee, and several times he responded to the question with long explanations without answering it, simply pretending that I had asked some other question. Because, as I now know, the answer is "no." It's just some random bullshit that UPS and only UPS does to international shipments. I think it's just an opportunity to snatch money from people while they're distracted and don't know what's going on, and don't have a lot of other options. If they presented to me this fee they were collecting when I was choosing to ship the package, I could say "fuck that I don't want that" and choose some other shipper.

Anyway, now that we've sorted out what's going on, I've been on the phone with UPS trying to get them to attempt redelivery so we can finally put this issue behind us and I can avoid UPS in the future for international shipments. The phone people just can't get their act together. Every person I talk to is surprised that I have an international shipment, and tells me I should have called worldwide shipping. I ask them for the phone number, and they give me the phone number I called. I point this out and they react with confusion and skepticism.

The first guy that I managed to get through this whole process with said that they can't find the package, took my email address (which took him four attempts to replicate even when I spelled it out very slowly), and said they would send me an email. The email I received was inviting me to set up a claim for a lost package. That's clearly not right, so I called back.

The second woman asked about transferring me to worldwide shipping, since I know now to ask about that first. I said fine but pointed out that I had called the exact same number she was giving me. She became very confused by this, and then launched into trying to help me anyway (?). She eventually told me back a bunch of information about the package that I had just told her, seemed to be reading to herself from some information she was looking up, and then told me to have the shipper contact UPS and create a MyChoice account. I asked her if she could just mark it to attempt redelivery, since I was already on the phone with her and she was UPS. In keeping with how the UPS people generally behave on the phone, I had to ask her this several times before she was willing to answer the question instead of just starting to talk about random stuff in a sympathetic tone of voice. It turned out that the answer was, no, she can't help me. I pointed out that UPS people had lied to me a few different times about how things would work, so I was a little skeptical. I realize this probably isn't a productive line of conversation for me to go down.

Anyway, she successfully attempted to pass me off to someone else as quickly as possible, so now I'm on hold. While listening to the music on speaker, I decided to make another attempt at setting up a ups.com account for myself. It didn't work the first time because it only works on Chrome, apparently, and browsing with Chrome is becoming a painful and insecure way to traverse the internet.

Anyway. Success! Now it wants me to set up my account.

I cannot possibly emphasize enough how little I want basic benefits like tracking notifications. I have the tracking number, I will check if I want to know what's going on with my package.

Wait! The person has answered the phone. I've now been on the phone, just for this call, for 34 minutes, just to reach the initial person who is apparently able to help me with this fairly simple issue. He is at least concise and seems to be able to understand the issue and what I want ("redeliver package pls") with a minimum of extraneous bizarro-world conversations where he repeats lots of details about my shipment back to me. He even knew the tracking number and asked me if he was looking at the right shipment, without me having to read it to him slowly and him fucking up taking it down multiple times as some other people I spoke to did. I feel like maybe that's just entertainment for them, if they're having a slow day, to make simpleton errors in the tracking number and see if they can get the customer wound up a little bit.

Update: After an extended hold, during which I got nowhere with the web site, he got back on the phone and reported that he had solved my issue, and they're planning to reattempt the delivery tomorrow.

I also am entertained to learn that this interaction was the only one that was followed up by a phone survey inviting me to indicate my level of satisfaction. I took the survey. I suspect that this segment of the operation somehow actually does care about their phone support people functioning at anything above "surly toddler" level, and so is following up about it, and that's why this man was competent. I suspect the rest of the operation mostly cares about saving money, not about anything competent happening to any person's package, and so that's the result they're getting.

I hit the button requesting to leave a voice comment at the end of the survey, but something fucked up in their system, and I wasn't able to. Oh well.

Don't use UPS for international shipments. Maybe not for other shipments.