You be the judge

My wife has suffered from Multiple Sclerosis for decades. She is a shut-in with limited mobility. Her iPhone 5s began to reboot continually, and since it is her ONLY PHONE I decided to get her the latest iPhone Xs MAX. It was supposed to arrive this Friday (September 28 or later).

UPS (United Parcel Service) sent me an email notification over the weekend telling me it would arrive Monday September 25th between 3 PM and 7 PM. It needed to be signed for. HOWEVER the driver arrived a few minutes before 2 PM, knocked lightly on the door and immediately left one of those “stickies” saying they would attempt ONE more delivery on the next day.

So I called to complain. By the time I finally got through the automated phone system to a real person I was well and truly steamed. Although attempting to assure the person on the other end of the phone that I knew it wasn’t his fault, I asserted in no uncertain terms how I felt about their automated phone system and the difficulty in talking to a human being. I also explained the situation and asked when the package would actually be delivered. The advice given to me was to be ready at 1 PM.

So while I was at work, my wife dutifully began waiting by the door at 1 PM for the UPS man. At work I tracked the progress of the UPS truck on a map via the “handy” UPS tracking website. At around 3 PM his truck was on my street a few houses down and I FaceTimed my wife on her iPad (recall that her iPhone does not work) to let her know that her new phone was almost there. Then for some inexplicable reason the UPS truck left our neighborhood. I tracked it continually until 7 PM when it finally got back to our house. Throughout this time I texted and FaceTimed my wife with updates. She was ready when he came to the door.

When the UPS guy finally got to the door my wife met him and asked why he didn’t come to our house at 3 PM when he was right there. His answer … he was specifically told by his supervisor to make us the LAST delivery of the day. UPS was punishing me for complaining!

Think about that for a minute.

So I called back UPS, navigated the phone system, and got through to another human. I rehashed all of the above and asked if it was UPS corporate policy to retaliate against customers who have complaints about service quality. I was of course assured that this was not the case and that someone higher up the management ladder would get back in touch with me. That was 24 hours ago. Nothing nada zip zilch.

What would you do if you were in my position?