Just don’t tell me to visit your bloody website

The recor­ded male voice who reg­u­larly answered the phone at my local Par­cel­farce World­wide depot today soun­ded very cheer­ful. Almost psychot­ic­ally cheer­ful, in fact. I know this because I spoke to him at reg­u­lar inter­vals through­out the day, in a doomed effort to try and find out where my par­cel had got to — the par­cel I had arranged to be rede­livered today, and had taken the day off work to await with no small degree of anti­cip­a­tion. The Psychot­ic­ally Cheer­ful Voice kept telling me to go and use their web­site instead. It’s lucky I’m online, isn’t it?

By 7.00pm, when the depot finally closed, I’d almost got to the point where I was shout­ing at him down the phone. Point­less, I know, but it made me feel a little bet­ter. “But I’ve already used your web­site to set up this rede­liv­ery, you bloody stu­pid recor­ded mes­sage! I can’t use it again! And any­way, your web­site is SHIT! Do you hear me? I know a little about web­sites, matey, and yours is SHIT!” Sadly, I never got very far with this apo­plectic explo­sion of rage, because the Psychot­ic­ally Cheer­ful Voice would snap­pily ter­min­ate the call after telling me that there was no one avail­able to speak to me because they were all so very busy drink­ing tea and hav­ing a fag. Doesn’t put me on hold — oh no, that would be far too polite — just rings off, after char­ging me to listen to an 0845 recor­ded mes­sage for nearly a minute.

Par­cel­farce make me feel strongly about com­pan­ies who lack plain, decent and simple cus­tomer ser­vices. They make me want to go round to that local depot and throw a brick through the win­dow. Around the brick would be a piece of paper, and scrawled upon it in blood red ink would be the mes­sage: “I JUST WANT TO SPEAK TO A FUCKING HUMAN BEING. PLEASE CAN I SPEAK TO A HUMAN BEING? PREFERABLY ONE WITH AN INTACT BRAIN CELL. THANK YOU.”

I’ve now developed this the­ory that Par­cel­farce is entirely staffed by devi­ous little elves, who are hold­ing the nation’s entire back­log of par­cels and pack­ages to ransom in a big cave in the moun­tains. Or something.

Mean­while, the Par­cel­farce web­site shows pic­tures of people beam­ing with hap­pi­ness as they receive their deliv­er­ies. Mark my words, those pho­tos aren’t real. Nobody’s ever received a deliv­ery from Par­cel­farce. Never. My Ger­man uncle sent me an Evel Knievel stunt motor­bike set — com­plete with ‘explod­ing bridge’ — for my fifth birth­day in 1976, and that never arrived either. Not that I’m bit­ter. On that basis, how­ever, the pack­age I was expect­ing today should be with me by the year 2034 — unless the Psychot­ic­ally Cheer­ful Voice actu­ally lets me speak to a real per­son tomor­row. I’ll let you know.