Friday, July 6, 2007

Delivery

We just had a printer delivered to work. One of those big freestanding ones. It came delivered on a truck without a tail lift, driven by 1 guy. This thing came in a box that filled a pallet and was 5 feet high. It took 6 of us to lift the thing off the truck, there was no chance the driver would ever have been able to do it on his own without a forklift truck. We're only a small company and a lot of days there wouldn't be that many people here. As it was there was a mention that we might have to send it back for redelivery because we weren't sure it was safe to lift off. It's not the driver's fault, I'm not sure exactly how companies expect a single person with no tail loading truck to deliver something like this. Of course, inside the big box were loads of smaller boxes so they could have solved the problem by just sending 6 packages on the same truck, or if we'd known before we opened the big box we could have just unpacked it on the truck.

A guy I work with had a similar problem with a dining table and chairs he ordered. The delivery guy turned up to deliver the table, again just one guy on his own in a truck, to where my co-worker's heavily pregnant wife was waiting to let him into the house. Of course, one driver and a heavily pregnant woman can't take a big table off a truck and into a house so the table went back to the depot. When you order something, and get it delivered, especially when you pay to get it delivered, shouldn't the delivery company send enough people to do the job? Or at least have a tail lift and a truck with wheels on to move heavy objects. It's probably all down to the consumer's drive to get the cheapest price possible, but it is very annoying that you need to ensure you have strong able bodied people available to receive a delivery.

My tip for delivery companies: If it takes a fork lift truck to get something onto the truck, you are quite obviously going to need the equivalent at the far end to unload it.

3 comments:

DV said...

I know this pain. Used to happen to me at my old job all the time because my desk was closest to the "delivery area" aka the side door. So these huge boxes of UPS' would come and I'd have to sign for the boxes and then help the damn guy unload 800 pounds of batteries.

The company was DHL. They blow.

Anonymous said...

You went outside of your office and helped move a heavy printer off a truck!!!??!!???

My respect in your laziness has taken a serious knock in the light of this recent story...

Mike said...

I didn't want to. Literally every person in the company who was in the office was helping. If anyone has any tips on how I could have avoided helping... I was all for sending it back to the depot.