Tuesday afternoon got less productive for me when I had to get in a 20-mile errand through some of Northern Virginia’s less enjoyable traffic. My reason for this drive to a light-industrial stretch of Eisenhower Avenue in Alexandria a few blocks from a trash-to-energy plant? A company that exists largely to deliver packages to people’s homes.

FedEx handed off this logistical chore to me after a series of missed connections that I should have seen coming, because I’ve seen it before. And I’ve written about it before–or I think I have, except Google and Bing can’t locate the post I remember doing for the Washington Post that included the phrase “FedEx house arrest.”

Back then and again this week, the problem began with a shipment for which the sender had required a recipient’s signature. In this case, it was a Pixel 6a phone from Google, a free replacement under a warranty-extension program for the Pixel 5a phone that had mysteriously self-bricked earlier this month. I had taken Google up on that offer Tuesday of last week while out of town, thinking that this order wouldn’t get fulfilled until I returned Sunday night.

But contrary to the e-mail from Google estimating a delivery window from Tuesday through Friday of this week, FedEx first showed up Wednesday of last week. With nobody around, the driver left a door tag asking for a signature; the neighbor who had been stopping by to check on our cat then texted a picture of that note, asking what to do.

The tag didn’t specify that my neighbor could have signed it, and meanwhile I thought I could solve the problem in FedEx’s delivery manager by waiving the signature requirement there. But that did nothing, resulting in another missed delivery and another door tag on Thursday. My attempt to set a vacation hold instead of just telling my neighbor to sign the door tag was equally unproductive, leading to yet another missed delivery.

After three “delivery exception” strikes, I was out–except FedEx’s site didn’t say that, instead describing the package as “on the way.” Throughout Monday, it predicted a delivery by 8 p.m. that night. That did not happen. When I got an equally vague delivery forecast Tuesday, I finally picked up the phone to call the company. Only then was I informed that I had to pick up the package at the FedEx shipping center in Alexandria before it closed that evening, lest this package get routed back to Google.

With my replacement phone finally picked up at the price of a reacquaintance with the traffic many people around here deal with every day, I then went all of 20 hours before another FedEx disconnect.

Thursday afternoon, the missed delivery was a new laptop for my wife. I knew it was coming at some point that day, but without an equivalent to Amazon’s delivery-map feature–an upgrade you might have thought FedEx would have made during the pandemic–I didn’t know when I should be near the front door.

And because I have an uncanny knack for being in the basement doing laundry or in the backyard weeding or otherwise not eyeing the front-porch steps when FedEx deliverypeople arrive, I missed that delivery attempt. The door tag is now signed, and I trust that this delivery saga will end Friday. I have less confidence that FedEx will sand down these rough spots in its delivery experience anytime soon.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/08/22/fedexs-delivery-of-delivery-data-could-use-some-work/

#AmazonMapTracking #cx #deliveryException #FederalExpress #FedEx #FedExDeliveryManager #FedExDoorTag #logistics #signatureRequired