You probably couldn’t care less, but this is the bike rack that arrived for me
along with a whole mountain of other stuff. (It’s an Axiom Journey model, in case you’re wondering)
Everything arrived on Friday, though not without a few adventures. At 9:08, a courier called me at the office! I had only just walked in when they handed me the phone right at the door. The following conversation ensued:
– Where can you collect the parcel?
– [I give him the office address]
– I don’t know where that is, and I don’t have a map (WTF?)
– Isn’t that sort of your job?
– The destination address I have is [my home address]
– Let me call you back and tell you how I can collect it
– I don’t know the number I’m calling from (WTF?)
– All right, call this number again in five minutes
He couldn’t get through when he called back—the number happened to be busy. He’s probably driven off to Riga with my stuff, I thought, and felt disappointed.
Over the weekend, I started looking for a phone number where I could find out what had happened to my parcel. To do that, I wrote to Parcel Force, the postal company responsible for deliveries from the UK bike shop chainreactioncycles.com. They replied with incredible politeness and profuse apologies, directing me to the website of their European Union partners, https://www.gls-group.eu/. Right there on the front page, I clicked Latvia, only to end up on the Lithuanian website www.lexsystem.com. And then—lo and behold—I spotted a “Chat with an operator” button, in Russian no less. There was no operator available on the weekend, admittedly, but there was a “parcel enquiry” form. I filled it in and explained my problem. Then I waited for results. Monday lunchtime arrived, but there was still no word whatsoever from the logistics people. And then, completely out of the blue, that very same courier called! He said he was about to bring the parcel straight to my office!
I nearly fell off my chair in surprise. And so everything was successfully resolved. So overall, the folks at the aforementioned companies get a passing grade. The courier—not quite; he behaved rather strangely.