@AVG the package got lost when the sender brought it to the post kiosk. They never traced it there and it had remained in limbo for the past 5 days. DHL customer disservice told me to wait another 2 days before I could file a complaint.
Now I will not voice what I think of them to remain in politically adequate waters.
I still hope it may turn up, I want that friggin X99 board because it is splendid for running stuff I am used to and I hate to lose ...
I hate them too. Frequently they manage to leave two or more notifications on a single day requiring me to visit two different places to optain my packages. And both of those places are stationery shops run by elderly women which are not very attentive and talk too much. A special nuisance is when the declared time/date for retrieval does not match the real situation and you have to repeat those errands. Arrrgh!
They used to drive me nuts at my previous job - if something was shipped via DHL, I could pretty much count on getting a call from the receiving department of a company (with a completely different name and street number, but about a quarter mile up the road on the opposite side of the street - and mind that this was not a crowded, heavily built up area)to tell me that DHL had left my package there and I could come by to pick it up or they would hand it back off to DHL the following day for redelivery. Needless to say, I welcomed the call and would always go and get it rather than risk it being handed off to those bozos to give them another opportunity to misdeliver it again. UPS, FedEx and the USPS had no issues finding our building. DHL? Not so much...
-Pat
The sheer irony of DHL's incompetence is the origin of the
original DHL in the UK. The name was originally Document Handlers Limited and they were a company expressly set up to exchange legal paperwork between lawyers in the UK and from lawyers to the courts, government registries and so on. The ownership structure was odd, but basically it was owned by the lawyers who were its customers. I have a vague memory of being told, but may be wrong, that its existence predates the General Post Office. They came into existence because the lawyers needed a strictly reliable, strictly trustworthy way to get papers back and forth. Instead of a full address you'd just put a "DH" number on a letter/package and law firms used to put their DH number on their letterheads for the benefit of other lawyers, right next to their telex number and telegraphic address.
Of course, with lawyers as clients you are
not going to fuck up because if there's one bunch of people who won't even blink at the idea of suing you for every penny they can get, it's lawyers. At some point rather late in their history, as these things do, they changed the name to DHL, because everybody called them that, and carried on under the name DHL. So, the upstart American DHL (which was a completely different beast) went on to become the global behemoth it is today, started doing overt business in the UK, and sometime in the 1980's acquired the rights to use the DHL name in the UK. So overnight, DHL went from being the name of the most reliable courier ever, to the name of the DHL that we all know and loathe.
I used to have lawyers as clients, and so knew the original DHL and their fearsome reputation for reliability. In fact, the company I worked for at the time was one of those rarities, a non-law company with a Document Handlers Limited account, because we did so much business with lawyers that it just made sense. That DHL could get a bit of replacement kit to a London lawyer's office faster than anyone else. So, a different client was having terrible trouble with a "DHL" delivery and was bitching to me about it when I was in their offices. I'd never heard such rubbish about them, "Tell you what, let me call our account manager there, he'll get it sorted in 2 minutes". There then ensues a very confused phone call that takes 10 minutes before we discover what's happened and that we're talking about two different DHLs. I can't be the only person that happened to as it was some time after that, that the naming rights changed hands. As there were lawyers involved and reputational damage, albeit unintentional, had gone on, I suspect that was one of the most expensive acquisitions of a name that the general public had never heard of.
I believe that the original DHL is no more. I haven't seen a DH number on a letterhead for years. Probably killed by the rise of that 80s phenomenon, the fax machine.