My neighborhood Facebook group is about 20% “do you recognize this apartment colliding vestibule?” From people trying to track down a package.
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I’ve had multiple instances recently where Royal Mail have refused to deliver something because “the property was inaccesible”. Based on the lack of extreme weather and/or road closures, I have concluded that one of the local posties doesn’t understand how to operate the buzzers on our block of flats…
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Was expecting a parcel once and I’d intentionally left the front door unlatched so they wouldn’t have to buzz to get in if I happened to be on a call at the time.
Turns out I was. They must have buzzed, got no answer and immediately left without even trying the door as by the time I got to the phone they’d gone.
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I once was expecting a package delivery and knew that the drivers for this particular company in my area are… confusingly lazy.
So I left the front door standing wide open as I sat in the living room, within sight of the door. I don’t recall what I was doing while I waited, possibly playing a video game, or perhaps reading a book or watching TV. Regardless, I was there in the room, visible from the doorway.
The driver reached through the open doorway to place the “We missed you! We’ll try again next business day” notice on the door that was open.
Well, it was Friday, and I knew that I would not be home Saturday or Monday, so if this didn’t work out, I’d have to go pick it up from the depot, which was an annoying process.
I called customer service and managed to get the driver to turn around and come back; she was so grumpy with me and, to this day, I can’t fathom why.
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(I may have told this before.)
I was once waiting for a book contract that had to be signed and returned ASAP (the publisher’s lack of organisation was of course my problem, as I’m sure any of you who have dealt with publishers will recognise). So I was waiting on the futon that was right next to my front door.
I heard the whisper of a clatter through the letter box as the DHL driver slid the “sorry you were out” card through the letter box. I jumped up and chased him down the road, shouting “oi, I’m not out” or words to that effect. If he hadn’t had to stop and unlock his van, he might well have got away, but in the end I prevailed on him to hand over the package.
My understanding is that they are paid so much per shift, and given a van load of packages; once they get back to the depot, having a log of delivery or attempted delivery for each item, the rest of the time is their own.
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Good grief; that all sounds terrible.
I was slightly miffed yesterday when I received email to say that my parcel had been delivered when I knew that no one had been to the house at all. The parcel turned up later in the day, though (which I suspect actually had nothing to do with me raising the issue with the postal company in the interim).
Having heard what some other couriers are like, I’m feeling positively lucky.
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Thankfully, deliveries here are flawless. Delivery, redelivery at the time of your choosing, or later the same day without even asking, repeated forever* until the package gets to you.
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I get the impression they are paid to do the job fast but not well
Most drivers are paid per delivery, or attempted dleivery. So the incentive is to not wait or shove a missed delivery letter through.
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Drivers here seem to be payed for packages delivered which is why they tend to just leave them somewhere around the house (plenty of spaces where stuff won’t get wet and it’s not an area where I’d worry about stuff being stolen either). DHL usually rings the bell. DPD does not. We rarely get the others anyway and if we’re lucky like today my Dad intercepts them outside.
We are planning to eventually get a “package box” that allows a single package to be locked inside and that we can then open to retrieve it.
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Every year on April Fool’s Day, the very wholesome official Paddington Bear account does this.
(For non-UK folks, “King’s Cross” is a similar London train station to Paddington Station, that Paddington Bear is named after)
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These are the types of April Fools things I enjoy. I am this kind of April Fool.
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Took me longer than I’d like to admit for the penny to drop.
Bonus points for Azul.
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Thesis: the underclass/foreigners/women are cultists.
Antithesis: the rich white men are cultists.
Synthesis: everyone but you is a cultist.
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The sudden realisation that the flyspell spelling checker in emacs is using Levenshtein editing distance when it suggests alternatives to something that’s not in the dictionary. Pretty sure normal people don’t notice things like that.
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a couple months ago, I got a parking ticket for having an expired license plate and associated sticker. I had, in fact, paid the state for a new sticker, it just hadn’t come yet. I appealed, on the grounds that paying the state is what makes it a valid registration, and not the display of the sticker, and included a copy of the receipt and a reference to the state statute that says the receipt is valid in place of the sticker. (I almost got another ticket the next day, but I saw the guy looking at the car and went out to talk to him. I live in an area that’s residential permit parking only, next to a commuter university, and they write lots of no permit tickets the first few weeks of every semester, and then slack off on enforcement.)
Today, I finally got a notice from the city. It says some stuff, some other stuff, then " an administrative law clerk has determined you are not liable for the ticket." It goes on to give detailed instructions on how to appeal, if I disagree. I get this is a boilerplate letter, and everyone gets that blurb. But, dammit, it’s not that hard to do the right thing and leave it off. in fact, I’ve previously successfully appealed parking tickets and I don’t remember the notice telling me how to appeal my victory.
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It’s probably not, though. flyspell invokes an external spell checker, originally ispell, but more likely to be aspell these days. ispell uses a levenshtein variant that allows for transpositions; plain levenshtein counts that as two changes (I forget what that variation is called, but it’s generally superior to plain levenshtein). it’s also got a second chance guess, which allows for inserted spaces and hyphens, but I forget the details. (ispell is a nightmare of horrible code, and setting it on fire, and surgically excising any neuron with knowledge of it, is the only safe course of action.)
Aspell uses metaphone, which is a soundex-like variation. It transforms a word into an approximate phonetic representation, and then uses that to search the dictionary. I think aspell is using a later improved version of metaphone, which is fundamentally the same, but has a different more complicated procedure to generate the phonetic representation. there are have been several variations of the algorithm, which improved the accuracy of suggestions and support for non English languages.
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the penquin was unharmed.
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I don’t know if the tone is lost in translation or it’s just hilarious
Before departing, one of the passengers, who the incident report referred to as a “specialist,” asked that they transport one of the penguins on the island back with them.
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