081 DELIVERIES

My, how time flies.  It’s been almost a year now since I moved here and the time has flashed by so quickly.  I love it out here, as I’m sure I have mentioned a time or two before.  I’ve got my first summer under my belt, the first Halloween, the first Christmas, the first New Year and the first winter and all the snow, ice and cold temperatures that has entailed.

I really don’t miss the old place, not really, but I will admit to having the odd pang or two.  This was brought home by a series of events in the past week.  First off, I discovered quite by accident that the old house is back up for sale again.  This is surprising because the young couple that bought it were so enthusiastic about the location.

They had all these plans of buying the location, tearing down the house and building the first “passive” home in Vancouver.  I’m not quite sure what that is, but I assume it’s to do with the “green movement”.  In any case, for some reason, it gave me a funny feeling, but they are not having a great deal of success in selling so far.  It’s apparently been on the market for 90 days, for $1.78 million.  A substantial increase over what they bought it for.  When I sold, it had 18 offers the first day and was sold that evening.

One thing I do miss from the old place is that when I ordered something from Amazon, I had the option in a lot of cases of “same day delivery”.  That would be order in the morning and have it by evening.  That isn’t the case out here.  The best I can order is one day delivery, but that sometimes stretches out to two days.

The other day, I had three different deliveries scheduled to arrive, all from different sources.  One from Best Buy, one from Amazon and one from Epson.  So, the Epson one, which was printer ink cartridges was scheduled to arrive Friday by Purolator.  At 10:00 AM, I took Toby out for his walk and discovered a tag on my front door saying Purolator had missed me.

I was home and nobody knocked on the door or rang the doorbell.  I know this because, I didn’t hear it and when Toby hears someone knock or the doorbell ring, he goes mental.  He didn’t.  The tag said I would have to pick up the package on Monday at their holding center in Langley.  That’s a 40-minute drive and a toll bridge away, both ways.  So, I phoned Purolator to complain and they rescheduled the delivery for Monday.

Usually, the package gets left on the front porch, so I don’t know what was the problem this time.  In any case, they arrived on Monday, rang the doorbell and left the package on the porch.  By the time, I went down one flight of stairs, there was no sign of the driver or his truck.  Wow, talk about speedy delivery.

My Amazon delivery, scheduled for a guaranteed Friday delivery was sent by Canada Post but when I checked the Super box, it wasn’t there.  I waited until after 8:00 PM to complain to Amazon, which would have meant a refund of shipping charges, when the doorbell rang.  There was my neighbour.  The package had been put in their mail slot by mistake.

The only one that made it on time was the order from Best Buy, but this one has me confused.  They normally have their own trucks to make the delivery and yet, I found the package in my mail slot in the Super box.  They must have mailed it because only Canada Post has access to those boxes.

On the plus side, I eventually got all three packages, but I never had these problems in Vancouver.  Well, except for the printer ink from Epson.  Every time I got a delivery from them by Purolator I ended up having to pick it up from their drop off center, but that one was only 5 minutes away.

One thing that has been as dependable as clockwork has been my newspaper delivery.  In Vancouver, I was lucky to get the paper by 9:00 AM every day.  Here the guy arrives at 4:30 AM every day.  It included the snowiest, iciest or rainiest days, it has arrived on time.  The only day that was missed was when the production plant was shut down by technical difficulties and no papers got out anywhere.

The only other difficulties I have had with deliveries is that if it is a new driver for a regular delivery, like my groceries from Save-On and they can’t figure out how to get into the complex.  The address says one street, but the only entrance is on another street around the corner.  Once the complex is finished, there will be a main entrance on the correct street.