Delivery people who don’t ring doorbells!

[Slayduggee]

I’ve missed two deliveries due to delivery people not ringing the doorbell. One yesterday where the parcel was tracked and would be delivered between X and Y so I made sure I would be in. Suddenly I receive a notification saying delivery was attempted but there was no safe place to leave the parcel. I was surprised to see a picture of the side of my house and path with my bathroom window open. My front door is at the side and the bathroom is next to it and my husband had opened the window when he got home. Both myself and my husband were in and no one rung the doorbell. I have a ring doorbell as well which is wired into the mains so it records everyone who rings the doorbell. I don’t have a door knocker on my front door either.

Today I receive a notification from Royal Mail that I have missed a delivery. I wasn’t expecting a delivery but I had been sat with my toddler in the living room and again no one rang the doorbell.

Hermes are the worst. And I’ve always been understanding with couriers. But why they think they can open my front door is beyond me.

I'm glad it's not just me. We have a loud bell and they hardly ever ring it. I am always missing parcels even though I'm nearly always in. I don't get it, doesn't it waste more of their time if they have to keep coming back?

Royal Mail parcel delivery man told me this week that he can't ring the bell- but can knock in the door. And a takeaway delivery man told me the same too. It doesn't make any sense though.

We are in a three storey house. If they knock we can't hear if in the higher floors. We have an additional device so can hear the bell, but for some reason they won't use it!

Went outside my back garden gate today for the first time this week, to find a box of flowers had been delivered and left on the other side of the gate to my house. It's often a week between going out there.

Looked back at my cctv: courier hadn't rung the front door bell at all....he'd gone straight from his van, up the drive, ignoring both the front door and side door and placed the box outside the back gate. He didn't leave a card through the letterbox at the front so I had no idea they were there.

They had been there three bloody days!

I've come to the conclusion that most people are stupid - and as delivery people are also people, a lot of them are therefore also stupid.

We have a parcel safe to the side of our door. It's in clear view of the front door and labelled 'parcel safe' with (what you would think were idiot-proof) instructions as to how to use it: basically put the parcel in and turn the lock - very Ronseal.

Nobody EVER uses it properly. Sometimes the postie will have a standard-sized letter, look at the standard-sized letter box and eschew it in favour of the (left unlocked) parcel safe. The very small percentage of people who do manage to put a parcel in never actually bother to lock it; nor do they put a card through, so it would be noticing that it's been locked that would alert us to the fact that there's a parcel in it.

We had an urgently-needed Prime delivery last week that would have easily fitted into the parcel safe. Not that they would have needed to, as we were in anyway - and tracking the delivery from several stops away. I refreshed the tracker to see how close they were and was informed that it had been 'handed to somebody at reception' (this is a residential road with ordinary houses on - none of us have a 'reception'. Having chased it up with Amazon and been refunded, a neighbour found it stuffed right down behind her bin, when she moved it on bin day. I simply fail to see how any delivery person can possibly see (say) 61 Acacia Avenue clearly written on a parcel label, ignore the house with 61 clearly on the gate and front door and instead stuff it behind the bins at number '59'. If they struggle that much with reading/understanding numbers, they probably shouldn't be driving a van to get to you in the first place.

The problem is that you can have the most obvious, pre-school-level instructions clearly written there - simple to the point of patronising - and still, the only people who will ever read them (and comment that they seem kind of unnecessarily obvious) are the minority of people who already do know very well how to do such basic things like press a doorbell to alert the householder or put a parcel in a lock-up box and do up the lock.

The people who need their hands holding and guiding step by step throughout a simple process that you could train a dog to do with its nose and/or mouth never actually get as far as reading the instructions right in front of their faces.

Maybe it's the whole double-whammy thing, where their stupidity causes them to think that they're much too smart to possibly need the instructions that they so clearly do need. I've only seen the trailer for it, but they already completely remind me of that chap in the Brassic 3 programme, who is in possession of some cheese which he admits he has stolen, yet takes great offence at being labelled a cheese thief!

!I don't get it, doesn't it waste more of their time if they have to keep coming back?

That's what I don't understand either: if you're under such time pressures (and I don't doubt that they are), why would you go out of your way to find a convoluted method, taking more time per delivery, that will likely lead to more work for you (for no extra pay) and complaints to your boss (and thus you), rather than doing the proper, obvious, best and quickest thing?

Amazon in particular (but also other companies) has such an astonishingly efficient logistics network, enabling goods to be sent hundreds of miles overnight and tracked all the way; what's the point of all that when the final-drop delivery person seems keen to ensure that your parcel gets somewhere near to you (stuffed behind a neighbour's bin, shoved down the side of your shed or whatever), but not actually to you in a way that is in any way helpful (or indeed known) to you?