Morons, Imbeciles, and Home Delivery

Virtually all adults know that at some point you’ll need to schedule a delivery of furniture or services to their abode. It could be a new couch, a termite inspection, or perhaps a new dishwasher. In the old days, such transactions were simple. One would go to the store or call the service. A salesperson would listen to what you wanted, ring up the sale, and discuss a convenient time for the delivery of the furniture or said service. You’d usually be assigned a four hour “window” to expect them, and that would be that. At the appointed time, your new furniture, etc., would arrive. At most, you’d lose half a day of work.

Not any more.

For you see, that was too simple, too old fashioned, too successful – totally inappropriate for our Brave New World of emotional, intellectual and spiritual gridlock and obfuscation. No, my friends, we now have a new way of doing things! And like most new ways, it blows chunks.
Nowadays, you go through the same process as listed above; ah, but now they’ve tacked on the dreaded “Confirmation Call”. It is amazing how much catastrophe and boneheadedness is contained in those two words. Stores and many large home services agencies now use subcontractors for their delivery and work. And these morons insist on calling you a day or two beforehand to confirm what is already obvious – that you want that god-damned chair/couch/whatever you paid for, delivered. Yea, right, like I drove down fucking Route 50 on a Saturday afternoon amidst a mutant traffic snarl that would make Hieronymous Bosch shit his pants, and then handed over my credit card for great gobs of money, just so I could ignore the deliveryman pounding at my front door two weeks later. Right.

But it gets better. You see, these clowns only call during banking hours, and if you aren’t home they leave a message on your answering machine saying they won’t deliver unless you call them back in, oh, the next hour or so. And then they don’t answer the phone, or it’s always busy, or they just are too frigging stupid to figure out to pick it up. You’re screwed, and so is your delivery. So these days, you have to take two days off from work: One for the actual delivery, and the second day for this completely useless and redundant “Confirmation Call” to your home. There you sit, like some deranged horny teenager in a late 50’s drive-in movie waiting for some pimply boy to call you for that date to the big dance. Staring at the phone waiting for it to ring as if the gods were about to tell you all their secrets. Fuck that. I ain’t no Patty Duke.

Oh, I know what you’re about to say – “But Rob – why don’t you just give them your work number to call for confirmation? That way you won’t have to waste time hanging around the house!” I’m way ahead of you. EVERY time we do this, Linda gives these fools her work number in addition to the home number. EVERY time, she states that this is the best number to call during normal working hours, (it being a normal work number, and all…). But that confuses delivery people. It makes their little heads hurt. After all, there are now TWO numbers to call. Two is such a complicated number. So much to count! Only about half the creatures in our phyla recognize it. This puts delivery companies somewhere on the evolutionary scale between Kansans and planaria. These Mongoloid Idiots NEVER call the work number, (Actually, I take back what I just wrote. It does a great disservice to Mongoloid Idiots, who have never caused me any hassles at all. I apologize.). They always call the home number – and NO MORE.

And the real kicker is, that even after you connect with these boobs, (usually days later), they still might not show up – nor call to let you know that they’re too drunk/stoned/ennui laden to do their job. This too has happened time and again. A couple of years ago, we tried to order a bookcase from some sand-heads over in Franconia. They missed TWO delivery dates! We drove down to their alleged store and cancelled the order. You should have seen the manager’s face! He couldn’t believe that someone would cancel an order just because they’d been jerked around twice! His sputtering, mewling, pseudo-defense still echoes in my ears. He actually wanted us to give them a THIRD chance to screw with us! (I imagine their backroom has a graph of employees with the tallies of how many days they’ve bamboozled a customer. At the end of the year, the employee with the most victims gets a lollipop and a gold star. Worthless pissants.

In all fairness, the rot has spread beyond deliveries. A little over a year ago, we’d decided to get a new outdoor grill. One of the area’s hardware stores advertised it on their website. You could check on inventory, as well as purchase and reserve it at the store while online. We did so. Unfortunately, we didn’t know that “online” meant “without truth or accuracy”. I left work early the next day to pick up our purchase. Down Route 1…...While the road was being repaired….In the rain. I can tell you now that Gilgamesh had an easier time of life than I did. I’ve no idea how long it took me to get there or what I did to survive; I only know that something deep within me changed forever…and for the worse. I finally managed to stagger into the store, and grabbed one of the slack-jawed, shambling clerks. After about a half an hour of near comatose efforts, she determined that they had no such grill on the premises – for me or anyone else. Once again, I immediately cancelled the order, and once again was met with the type of panic response one normally associates with the collapse of a world view. The woman was positively drowning in cognitive dissonance. She simply couldn’t believe I wasn’t willing to pay them money for an item THEY DID NOT HAVE. I have not gone back.

As I type this, Linda and I currently locked in a life or death struggle with Sears’ delivery subcontractor. The prize is a dishwasher – I am not holding my breath, ( and I am getting ready to cancel, sending another assistant manager’s mind spinning off into retail limbo…).