Tracking is like a lost dog these days because every time we get one it goes wandering off and we have to email ahead and ask if anyone’s seen it. “I saw one the other week”, just that, coupled with the sound of barking from a few streets over. The future might be bright, but it is underscored with on-hold music. The 90’s were a simpler time.
Just as your old VHS player (possibly your Dads or Grandad’s) gave you a tracking control knob, Royal Mail give you a special code. Both share a similar effect upon clarity. The picture seemed to clear one way until everything would melt in slices. They other way brought snowstorm.
The trouble was back then we needed two tape machines plugged into each other to pirate a copy. Unscrupulous pirates (the majority, tut tut) would borrow the original tape from a rental shop, and run copies off that. With a resultant loss of quality. You could twiddle one way and the other, both offering different levels of wrong. Here’s your tracking, one way offers blur, the other static. “It’s you, not me” your VHS player was saying.
The Tracking does nothing.
So a tracked parcel, in theory, is picked up from Sheepskin Towers (Devon, UK) and scanned into the asylum. Whatever asylum, be it Royal Mail’s angry red one, DPD’s hollow cube, or any of the innumerable scanners who pour the streets trying, through pot holes and darkened walkways, saving souls. Shoes, TV’s, you name it. If you can order it, they will scan that tiny beast on your very doorstep. Eventually.
Royal Mail’s tracking is currently (in my opinion) a sort of proof of delivery. Why sort of? Well one customer recently had an order go missing and upon checking the “proof of delivery” was a photo of a box emblazoned with “eBay”, being given to a different person at a different house. For comedic purposes, let’s say in a different town.
So, mostly, please just view your tracking as a receipt – if you check online you will often be told it’s not in the system, or the country, or correct time zone.Something won’t look right with it. Perhaps it has a funny accent, or it might have the wrong colour passport.
Maybe your own county’s gone rogue, and is now effectively operating its own border guard. But in 99 out of 100 times it is OK and will arrive. It’s the tracking that’s pooched. Mostly, we find, one of those good folks from Royal Mail tend to pop every delivery right through your letter box, eventually.
In any case of late arrival, get Shannon and me on the case and we’ll get it sorted. Have a grand Bank Holiday weekend, whatever you’re up to. Hopefully we get to go outside rather than watch old videos!
Sunny wishes! Chris