Irritating day

I mentioned, recently, getting a bit more into photography. One of the reasons I got the bigger ball-head was that I had already ordered a new camera that was much heavier than my old one.

Anyway, the new camera was originally supposed to ship in the middle of February. For some reason (I heard several ideas, but no consensus on why), they didn't end up shipping until the fifteenth of this month. And despite preordering on the first day, I was not in the first batch of cameras shipped from the store. I wasn't feeling too good about that, and was wondering if I'd have to wait for months, but was happy to get a shipping notice last week (it seems that Nikon sent out another batch much quicker than they usually do).

Bad luck (them attempting to deliver just minutes before my wife got back home from taking the kids for a walk) kept me from getting it Saturday. It being Fedex Home, they didn't make another attempt until today. Since I was kind of anxious (and it required a signature), I stayed home all day waiting for it (well, and doing work on my computer).

I checked the tracking a few times, not seeing anything (not even, "out for delivery") until 1430. Then, it said that they had failed to deliver at 1418. Well, I was within 20 ft of the door at 1418, and there was no door tag left, so I can only conclude that they tried to deliver to the wrong house (odd, given that they got the right house on Saturday). Thank goodness I didn't tell them they could leave it without a signature; who knows where it would have ended up? Irritating enough, but it got even worse when I tried to call them right afterwards. They claimed that the driver would come by before 1530.

Ok, I've had second delivery attempts when they've screwed up at least one time before (although that was UPS).

So I went back to my work until 1610 or 1615; at which point I called again. Now they tell me that, not only is the driver already back to the depot, but that he was already back when I called the previous time. And they have no way to get the package to me (not helped by Fedex home drivers being contractors, apparently) today, nor can I go to pick it up myself (because pick-ups stop at 1630, and the depot is 30 minutes away).

And as if all that wasn't enough, when I called Ritz to complain, they just kept telling me what the tracking information page said. Thanks, I found that myself. Even worse, the person I was talking to kept going silent for long periods of time (30+ seconds) without telling me they were doing something. I just kept talking, and then getting dead air. I even hung up on them once because I thought they'd lost me. But the same useless guy answered again when I called back.

Very poor customer service from both FedEx and Ritz, to put it mildly. And I'm definitely not getting anything shipped via FedEx Home ever again.Regular FedEx? Sure. But not the Home variant.