On this years april fools a weird thing happened. Our fridge tried to pull a joke on us and died. Except it wasn’t a joke – it really died. Full of food. I should remind you that it was Saturday. To cut a long story short we went out and bought a new one on the same day.
The first shock was that it was not possible to deliver it on the same day. Not even if we paid. No sorry or anything, just an authorative answer that their delivery service is only possible during weekdays. Annoying. The next surprise was that the delivery service only delivers when normal people are at work. Makes sense if you’re the delivery guy, but completely no sense if you’re not. You have to take time off (which costs money) to be there when they come. They did offer to call half an hour before delivery which is a point for them though.
So I left work to welcome them in to a prepared working space – I moved the furniture and removed the rugs. All this to make it easier for them to carry the new fridge in. Needless to say we even threw our old one out by ourselves. Unfortunately there was no “them”. There was only one guy – the driver. No fuss, I overexpected. Stupid me, its a free service! Or maybe stupid them – they could have sold us delivery if there were two of them and they’d carry it in. They never even tried. To substantiate on this – I had money prepared to tip them if they brought the damn thing in. The guy said that they deliver ‘to the building’. I’d never sign the delivery papers if they left it in front of the building. Later I heard some companies use the term free transport for the same (evil) thing.
To sum things up – we would have paid for a better service but nobody offered it. I still can’t decide if I should attribute this to the fact that such service is not feasible, to the stupidity of the company or to the ignorance of the whole nation.
I’d say all of the above, but such service is definitely feasible.