Daughter number one
finally has her date for moving out of the house so I went online to buy some
boxes and packing material from this lot:
http://www.mad4boxes.co.uk
sales@mad4boxes.co.uk
The website was good,
the prices good and the promise of delivery the next day was exactly what I
needed.
The only fly in the
ointment with the mad4boxes people is that they chose City Link to
"deliver" my goods.
In my order,
mad4boxes threw in some free boxes, and that was both a great idea and very
welcome. So in fact my order was despatched as two packages (both well wrapped
in heavy duty clear plastic).
As instructed by the
liars at City Link, who said my parcel would be delivered on the 20th July
before 17:30, I stayed in.
Moreover, so did my
wife and as such, when we are both in, the dog, Dolly the Cockapoo, usually
kips in the porch. Thus is it impossible for anyone to even get onto our drive
without much barking, let alone push something through the letterbox.
All day long,
nothing. Now I was not concerned about this as we live about 1 mile from the
den of thieves aka the City Link depot so I figured I may well be the last
call.
At 17:33, I looked
online and was somewhat stunned to see the website declare that they'd tried to
deliver at 12:10 but to no avail and had thus shoved a card through the
letterbox.
This card would
contain all of the data I needed to effect a collection.
I challenged my wife,
had she heard anything/seen a card? Nope!
I inspected the porch
area and dog's mouth for evidence of an eaten card, nothing!
So I called City Link
helpline. You'll start to understand why I think of City Link as liars as first
off they claim to be a delivery company, they are most clearly not that, and
second off they claim to have a help line - they do not!
On a Friday evening,
I spent 45 minutes hanging on the line before the phone was answered.
Having run call
centres and knowing how these things work there are only two conclusions to be
drawn here:
1. The call centre
management are inept and should be sacked.
2. So many parcels go
missing, the call centre can't cope. In which case the Head of "Delivery"
and the call centre manager should be sacked.
So I got the phone
answered and had the usual barely credible call that often takes place with a
call centre operative.
It started with his
confident declaration that they had tried to deliver and in fact it was my
fault for being a hapless cretin and not being in.
I shared with him the
wife and dog routine at which he even more happily declared he could trump that
by sending me a picture of my house proving that the driver had in fact been
there.
So efficient are City
Link at providing excuses that all of this happened in minutes - if only they
could be so efficient in getting the stuff delivered in the first place!
So, in seconds and
email from "Bert Skok" - yes that was his name, arrived, and guess
what, not only was it not my house but the number of the house, clearly visible
in the picture, is not even number eight!!!
So I then had a
rather out of body chat with Bert who, having apologised, told me just to take
the card into the depot the following day and I could get my stuff.
Two issues with this,
first I ordered the stuff for delivery, and on the 20th as that is
when I needed it, and second, I didn't have the card as either it never existed
or they'd posted it through the letterbox to the wrong bloody house!
Bert then told me,
don't worry, just turn up and it will all be fine, no doubt he was by now rather
keen to get rid of me as City Link was in the wrong and not me.
I had to insist he
send me an email so I could take this to the depot the following day, which he
did and we wished each other a spiffing evening.
At 08:02 on the 21st,
I set out to collect my parcels.
At 08:07 I was
standing in reception to the depot to be told by the boy in reception that I
was awfully lucky as one of my parcels had only just arrived?
Only just arrived I
said, there were supposed to be delivered yesterday!
No mate, was the only
response I got.
Finally, having done
most of their work for them, I had my parcels.
Attached below I have
the screen shot of the City Link delivery website that contains a pack of lies.
From this, you can
see that in fact my two parcels were not sent together from their depot, there
was clearly a cock up and they were sent separately.
The driver supposed
to deliver, didn't and is both incompetent and a liar.
The website shows I
was not in, not true! I was, as was my wife and the dog, what the website
should show is that they tried to deliver to the wrong place.
The website shows
that the product has been delivered! It was not, I had to collect it.
So the moral of this
story is: if you use mad4boxes to buy, arrange for collection as they don't
actually have a delivery service at all and if any website from which you buy
in the future shows they use City Link, either don't buy from them, find out
where your local City Link depot is as you will most certainly be visiting and
make sure you have a couple of days to waste whilst you track down your order.
So to summarise:
CityLink, world-class logistics company or bunch of lying useless numpties?
I'll let you decide.
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