OT:Hermes

Just be grateful that they arrived...

I got contradictory messages one after the other then when the courier eventually arrived he claimed he did not work for Hermes anyway and gave me a pile of abuse. He also said he had been round earlier but didn't know where I lived. I think his closing line was: 'You can complain about me if you like but it will achieve f*** all.'.

I've generally found them pretty good. And have a convenient drop off point.

Of course given the millions of transactions, some, with any company, are bound to go wrong.

I bet the German ones will still get there more quickly.

All 11 drivers, as well as the Auchinleck depot boss, have said their jobs are in jeopardy following Hermes? decision.

The announcement came weeks after the self-employed drivers asked to be paid for work they had previously done for free at the small site in Auchinleck.

They told the firm they would no longer sort parcels at the plant before delivering them.

The job saw couriers turn up early for work to assist the depot manager in dealing with lorry loads of goods dropped off by Hermes .

However, the drivers are only paid per parcel they deliver, which is typically about 50p to 80p each.

Owain

That sounds about what I'd expect :-(

I had various bad experiences with them over about a 6-month period (when they delivered things from Amazon), but since then they have been good. OK, their delivery hours can be very varied (we once had something delivered at

And did not get left out in the rain under a bush or broken. Brian

I've never sent anything by courier, and I haven't had any problem with deliveries to me. However, I've decided it's far less hassle if the goods are delivered to a local drop-off point (usually a 7/11 street-corner convenience store).

Indeed, I would have taken this option if available.

I remember a story many years ago about a postman doing this. The problem was it was the wrong house. When he realised his mistake, he saw a ladder in the garden and tried to recover the package. Unsurprisingly, one of the neighbours called the police!

During the "bad period" this happened to us: my wife had ordered a weather station for me for Christmas and we came back one snowy day to find a very soggy, dented cardboard box on the doormat, with footprints leading towards the front door but stopping about 10 feet away. There was a scuff mark and a chip out of the paint in the front door.

It seems that the delivery driver had walked part of the way to the front door, and had then lobbed the box (marked FRAGILE) at the door.

That device was sent straight back because with a delicate device I wasn't going to accept something that could have been damaged by damp and being thrown several feet. Amazon were very good about replacing it immediately - and then used a different courier after I said "If this is how they treat packages that they have been entrusted to deliver, you really need to stop using them".

On another occasion they played the "customer was not in" game - but I caught them. I'd seen the van pull up and I was walking to the front door to open it, so I saw the driver walk to the door, immediately put a "you were out" card through the letter box and turn to walk away. I opened the door and said "I *am* in" and was greeted with a torrent of abuse, which included the phrase "your F-ing bell doesn't work" to which I retorted, with a big grin on my face, "That's because you didn't even F-ing try it, and you didn't knock either." He carried on walking away with my package, so I had to run after him in my bare feet to get it from him. Again, I reported that to Amazon and had a very apologetic reply with a promise to get the courier to investigate, and then a few days later a statement "That driver no longer works for them". I felt a bit guilty: I was hoping he'd just get a severe bollocking, not the sack.

But since then, things seem to have improved dramatically.

Normally that works well, as long as a) the package is small enough to fit in the locker, and b) the locker actually opens when you enter your code. I've only had it fail to respond at all (even with an "incorrect code" error). It didn't help that the supermarket where the locker was situated was in a dead zone for mobile signal, so I had to go outside to phone, then when they told me to try various things, go inside where the call got dropped, and then phone again from outside to report what hadn't happened - we went through several cycles of that before Amazon acknowledged that there was a problem and arranged for a replacement to be sent out with a new code, which meant another journey into town a couple of days later.

But that's only failed once. Normally Amazon lockers work fine.

Before there was an Amazon locker in town, I used the local Asda as a collection point, and the staff always had great difficulty getting the system to accept the code that I gave them and to issue authorisation to hand over the package: it was rare if it took less than 10 minutes from arriving to walking out with the package. The scanner never managed to read the bar code from my phone so they always had to enter it by hand, several times because they often mis-keyed it. I'm not sure whether it was human error or an error in the terminal that they were using.

Our postman once put a letter for a neighbour through our letter box by mistake - and we were away for the weekend. That neighbour was an awkward sod, and there was "history" between him and the couple on the other side, so they decided that they wouldn't admit that they had a key for our house and could retrieve the letter, and made him wait till we got back on Sunday night. There was a big note on our door saying "The instant you get home, please bring this letter round to us", and strangely we didn't see it until the following day ;-)

That chap really was a nasty bugger. I think a lot of the problem was that the street were ex-council-houses. We owned our house because the previous owners had bought it under Maggie's right-to-buy, and so did the couple next to us. Miseryguts was still a tenant, though now of a private housing association, and he had a real chip on his shoulder about that. He had a go at me for hanging spades on nails on the alley wall that was shared with his house, and for painting it. "You're not allowed to do that - that wall belongs to the housing association and I'll tell them". I told him about the legal status of party walls and that I can do what I like with my side of the wall as long as it doesn't harm his house. I had a phone call from the housing association a few days later saying "don't take any notice of his blustering".

In message <qiv7np$aj6$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, NY snipped-for-privacy@privacy.invalid writes

Locker? I'm referring to your local convenience store.

There is (was?) a size limit even for counter service in a shop (eg the Asda that I mentioned) - probably because they need to store the parcels in their own secure cupboard until the customer comes to collect. There have been a few times where I've had to try several different collection points (either staffed or Amazon locker) until I found one that could accept delivery of certain sizes of box.

It was four hub caps in a box, so this may have been too large for a convenience store to handle.

I don't see the person that gave me abuse in that line-up :-)

Yes, I use Amazon lockers in France, very handy when you don't actually have a 'proper' delivery address (we have a small boat over there).

I always wonder how a 'scanner' can resd the bar code off a phone. Scanners mostly appear to be designed to 'see' things reflectively and thus, surely' won't work with a phone. I'd have thought you'd need two sorts of reader, one reflective and the other for screens.

The same thought has occurred to me. Maybe on modern barcode scanners the illuminating laser can be turned off so the sensors see the transmitted light from the screen rather than the reflected laser light from a paper barcode. Obviously a laser shone at a glass screen will not reflect a pattern that depends on what is displayed by the LED screen.