The Speed of E-Business

Don't make me laugh. All E-business amounts to for me is a pain in the ass.

Where to start? The US Post Office won't deliver mail to my house. We are apparently too far off the edge of the world for that, even though I can literally see mailboxes from my front yard. It's too much bother for the postal carrier to travel another thousand feet to my house. But in a way that's okay, because whoever delivers the mail has Herman Munster's throttle foot and is forever tearing up the road with excessive wheelspin.

Meantime, FedEx and other carriers won't ship to my Post Office Box - they'd rather find my house than find the post office, I guess.

Meantime, most of the companies I do mail-order business don't understand this critical distinction and are forever sending my stuff to the wrong damn address! Our stuff is forever being returned to senders because it was sent to the wrong address. Sometimes I can intervene if I know the tracking number, but most of the time it's just gone, as though it fell into a black hole.

Here's the latest example. I bought a relay from a company back east somewhere, and clicked the FedEx box on their website. Confident that they would actually use FedEx, I gave them my street address, because FedEx will ship to it (but not to my PO Box). So I check my email today and see that they've shipped my relay, fine and dandy, except, goddamnit, they changed the shipping method to the US Postal Service, which means my package isn't addressed properly because the US Post Office won't deliver to my house! So the relay will go back to the company, and I'll have to order a new one, and chances are that once again they'll randomly change the shipping method...

One of the reasons I do a lot of business with Squadron (http://www.squadron.com/) is that they've never screwed up the shipment method. I've never had to chase down a shipment, and they're so reliable I don't even bother with tracking numbers. They've got this e-business stuff down. But most of the other companies I do business, getting them to ship to the right address is like having my wisdom teeth pulled. Gawd. It's enough to make me scream.

UPDATE: It's official, the relay has to go back to Iowa; the USPS can't (more like won't) forward it to my PO Box. That's nice. But they never miss an opportunity to raise stamp prices, do they?