Over packaging



  • Today i got this parcel from DHL at work, from oracle Romania. 

    quite surprised (didn't expect a gift :p) i promptly opened it and found this

     

    Yes, a simple letter oO

    The letter has the same recipient address in Belgium as the parcel.

    Actually, the letter was written in Belgium

    So if i understand: letter (a bill) is written in Belgium. From there, it's sent (in a parcel because there are no marks on the enveloppe) to romania, where they put it in another parcel to send it back to me in Belgium. The letter took 1 and a half week to be delivered to me. From Vilvoorde to my office, it's a 20 minutes ride...

    Worse, if you track the shipment, it took a flight from Romania to Germany and there a flight from Germany to Brussel... No wonder oracle trainings are so expensives!

    But, oracle that care of the planet. DHL parcel is made of recycled material, letter is printed on recycled paper....



  • You're right, they should have driven it over to you personally.



  •  Yo dawg etc...



  • Or just put a damn stamp on letter?


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

     Can you blame them for wanting to make sure the letter was double protected and had tracking on it? Oracle cannot afford to spare any expense in satisfying their customer.



  • I don't know how your fancy European mail works, but just because the return address is in Belgium doesn't mean the letter was printed and mailed from Belgium. My assumption is that it works something like this:

    • Letter is printed in Romania to make use of cheap labor. Return address is set to the local office handling your account.
    • All letters get put into a normal envelope.
    • The shipping contract for Belgium is with DHL. DHL doesn't take plain envelopes and requires everything to be in one of their mailers.
    • Letter, in mailer, enters DHL's logistics system, which routes it through Germany.


    TRWTF is 1.5 weeks. Between NYC and LA, that would take a maximum of, like, 3 days. And they're much further apart than Belgium and Romania. Anyway, I've occasionally received letters like this; it's usually because the shipper wanted it overnighted or with special tracking.

    Bonus TRWTF: are they sending you to collections? If so, that probably explains why they are shipping it with DHL: they want proof you received the letter.



  • Similar tale: I recently ordered some USB cables and spotted a cheap 16G mem chip, so dropped that on the order.

    The cables came in two packages: one was a few cables rolled up and stuffed into a Jiffy bag (padded envelope), the second was a HD-sized box containing bubble-wrapped cables. I thought the second could have been slipped into a similar bag to the first, but...

    ... the third box was larger than A4 and a good couple inches deep, as though it could have contained a laptop (without much protection), but was exceptionally light. Ripping it open, in there lay a 16G SD-RAM chip in a square of antistatic bag. And a delivery note.

    It wasn't so much the HP approach to packaging I found surprising, more the lack of any internal padding - or that all three packages could have easily fitted into the last box with space to spare.



  • My most recent packaging overkill was that I ordered a Monotron Duo - just a bit of fun. Now, bearing in mind this thing is about the size of a wallet, and comes in that typical totally indestructible thick plastic blister pack, how do you think I received it? Of course, in a jiffy bag, surrounded by bubble wrap, in a cardboard box you could store 3 full size pizzas stacked up in, surrounded by bubble wrap, in a plastic bag.

    Given it's a £30 product and shipping was free, [i]jesus![/i]



  •  This reminds me of when I ordered two copies of Windows 7 Professional and one copy of Windows 7 Ultimate from the UK. The Ultimate took a long time, but after several weeks it had arrived. Somewhere in the afternoon, it was picked up by DHL, went to their local distribution centre, was flown to Leipzig in eastern Germany, then to Marseille in southern France, and from there to Malta, all in a time frame of perhaps 16 hours.

    In Malta, the local DHL delivery guy couldn't find the address, even though that Valletta (with just under 7000 inhabitants) is probably the smallest European capital after Vaduz (Liechtenstein), so it got delivered a day later.



  •  Man, packaging, right?

    Like, I got these packages once, and they were a lot bigger than the item itself, because of padding material! WTF!



  • I once ordered stuff from a PC store about 10 miles from home.

    Courier came when nobody at home.

    Collected package from courier depot which was 15 miles from home.

    Drove past PC store on the way to the depot.

    PC store was open.

     

     


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dhromed said:

     Man, packaging, right?

    I like to pop the bubbles.



  • @boomzilla said:

    I like to pop the bubbles.
     

    We can be friends.



  • @mikedjames said:

    I once ordered stuff from a PC store about 10 miles from home.
     

    For every compression algorithm, there necessarily exists data that will become larger when fed into to the algorithm.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @dhromed said:

    @boomzilla said:
    I like to pop the bubbles.
    We can be friends.
    Here you both go. Don't think there's a two player version though..



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I don't know how your fancy European mail works, but just because the return address is in Belgium doesn't mean the letter was printed and mailed from Belgium. My assumption is that it works something like this:

    • Letter is printed in Romania to make use of cheap labor. Return address is set to the local office handling your account.

    Probably, yes. However:

    Date on letter was 1.5 week before receive date.

    Other bills i receive from oracle where received using regular post

    Why the hell bother to use recycled paper when you deliver letters from accross europe at the price of two airplaines and an additional cardboard enveloppe? (Letter weighted about 30gr, cardboard enveloppe was 600 gr)

    If all our supplier where doing this to send their bills, we could order a 20 cube meter paper container just to fill it with those big enveloppes

    The small letter said "accounting departement" in recipient area, where the big enveloppe did not, so all i did was take out letter and put it in the correct mail box (accounting department)

     

     



  • @tchize said:

    Why the hell bother to use recycled paper when you deliver letters from accross europe at the price of two airplaines and an additional cardboard enveloppe? (Letter weighted about 30gr, cardboard enveloppe was 600 gr)

    Recycling is rarely rational. This makes about as much sense as anything else recycling-related I've seen..



  • @tchize said:

    Why the hell bother to use recycled paper when you deliver letters from accross europe at the price of two airplaines and an additional cardboard enveloppe? (Letter weighted about 30gr, cardboard enveloppe was 600 gr)

    If all our supplier where doing this to send their bills, we could order a 20 cube meter paper container just to fill it with those big enveloppes

    It appears to me that you are explaining yourself why they should bother to use recycled paper.



  • @dhromed said:

     Man, packaging, right?

    Like, I got these packages once, and they were a lot bigger than the item itself, because of padding material! WTF!

    I once ordered an item from a nearby city, and it travelled to a much further city before reaching me!



  • @lolwtf said:

    I once ordered an item from a nearby city, and it travelled to a much further city before reaching me!
    If you send any mail in a postbox in my home town on a weekend, no matter what the destination is, it is taken to Adelaide to be sorted. So if you post a letter to someone in the town on a Saturday, it's travelled over 1000km to get to its end destination.



  • @PJH said:

    @dhromed said:
    @boomzilla said:
    I like to pop the bubbles.
    We can be friends.
    Here you both go. Don't think there's a two player version though..
     

    I foresee the worlds greatest popporpg.



  • @dhromed said:

    I foresee the worlds greatest popporpg.

    What if later in the game you discovered the domes you're popping are actually artificial biodomes built by the remainder of a dying race, and you've accidentally committed genocide?



  • @nexekho said:

    @dhromed said:
    I foresee the worlds greatest popporpg.

    What if later in the game you discovered the domes you're popping are actually artificial biodomes built by the remainder of a dying race, and you've accidentally committed genocide?

    Game of the Year.



  •  I used to work at a computer place that used the cheapest UK courier service they could get at the time, lets call them "Shitty Stink". Occasionally we would do swapouts on items, perhaps because they were incorrect or faulty.

    Of course we specified to the customer the usual t&c of 'put it back in the original box', sometimes they didn't have a box, we'd just say make sure its well protected in a box and some bubble wrap.

    Now of course its kinda the customer's fault if they didn't find packaging, if they didn't the courier would take one look at it and say "I can't take that its not even packaged!" or "Where am I supposed to affix the label?" or suchlike.

    Unfortunately some drivers out there just didn't care, didn't know any better or just didn't want the hassle.

    I experienced the complete opposite of the excessive packaging problem one day when I received back a 3.5 hard disk, with a courier label slapped on the top. Bare, unboxed, label covering the "do not cover this hole" hole and pretty obviously after its been thrown from basket to basket to van as it made its away across the island kicked to shit.

    Of course it was in no fit state to RMA back to the manufacturer now, the customer didn't care as we'd sent it on swapout and he already had his new drive and on complaining to the courier all we got was "Well so what, it was broken anyway!"

     



  • @EncoreSpod said:

     I used to work at a computer place that used the cheapest UK courier service they could get at the time, lets call them "Shitty Stink". Occasionally we would do swapouts on items, perhaps because they were incorrect or faulty.

    Of course we specified to the customer the usual t&c of 'put it back in the original box', sometimes they didn't have a box, we'd just say make sure its well protected in a box and some bubble wrap.

    Now of course its kinda the customer's fault if they didn't find packaging, if they didn't the courier would take one look at it and say "I can't take that its not even packaged!" or "Where am I supposed to affix the label?" or suchlike.

    Unfortunately some drivers out there just didn't care, didn't know any better or just didn't want the hassle.

    I experienced the complete opposite of the excessive packaging problem one day when I received back a 3.5 hard disk, with a courier label slapped on the top. Bare, unboxed, label covering the "do not cover this hole" hole and pretty obviously after its been thrown from basket to basket to van as it made its away across the island kicked to shit.

    Of course it was in no fit state to RMA back to the manufacturer now, the customer didn't care as we'd sent it on swapout and he already had his new drive and on complaining to the courier all we got was "Well so what, it was broken anyway!"

    In those cases I would recommend:

    • Create a bill for the hard drive and send it to the customer
    • After customer ignors said bill for over a month, turn the bill over to a collection agency
    • Relax in the knowledge that that customer is going to be harassed for the next 3 months over it


  • @Anketam said:

    @EncoreSpod said:

     I used to work at a computer place that used the cheapest UK courier service they could get at the time, lets call them "Shitty Stink". Occasionally we would do swapouts on items, perhaps because they were incorrect or faulty.

    Of course we specified to the customer the usual t&c of 'put it back in the original box', sometimes they didn't have a box, we'd just say make sure its well protected in a box and some bubble wrap.

    Now of course its kinda the customer's fault if they didn't find packaging, if they didn't the courier would take one look at it and say "I can't take that its not even packaged!" or "Where am I supposed to affix the label?" or suchlike.

    Unfortunately some drivers out there just didn't care, didn't know any better or just didn't want the hassle.

    I experienced the complete opposite of the excessive packaging problem one day when I received back a 3.5 hard disk, with a courier label slapped on the top. Bare, unboxed, label covering the "do not cover this hole" hole and pretty obviously after its been thrown from basket to basket to van as it made its away across the island kicked to shit.

    Of course it was in no fit state to RMA back to the manufacturer now, the customer didn't care as we'd sent it on swapout and he already had his new drive and on complaining to the courier all we got was "Well so what, it was broken anyway!"

    In those cases I would recommend:

    • Send the head of their pet/family member in a package without a return address.
    FTFY

    What, too pushy?


  • @C-Octothorpe said:

    @Anketam said:
    In those cases I would recommend:

    • Send the head of their pet/family member in a package without a return address.
    FTFY

    What, too pushy?
    Nope, as long as you are sure not to properly package it, just like they did with the hard drive.

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