You’ve gotta larf…

I had an amusing incident today – for me anyway, but maybe not for the other party. I seem to be getting a lot of deliveries nowadays that use DPD as the courier company and maybe because of that, problems with drivers being unable to find my house have been few and far between. But not today.

DPD operate a system where you pre-arrange a delivery time with them – today it was any time between 1000am and 0130pm – and it seems to work pretty well. Normally if the driver doesn’t already know where my house is (there are no house numbers in the countryside and even our road doesn’t have a name, although that’s scheduled to change sometime this year), when they get to the general area and are close by, they just phone for directions and arrive within minutes.

But it seems that today’s driver decided to take it into his own hands and search for the house which is not a good idea. It seems that he drove up and down the road two or three times (I saw him twice from my front window without knowing who he was as he was driving a hired vehicle) before doing the sensible thing and giving me a call. As a result when he did call he was in a highly agitated state, to say the least.

I tried to find out exactly where he was so I could give him precise directions but he seemed more concerned with shouting down the phone at me and almost seemed to be accusing me of hiding my house from him (it’s on the main road) to make his job more difficult and I cut him off a few times just to get some relief from his tirade. In the end I told him that if he’d shut up for a minute I’d explain how even a monkey could find my house from where I think he said he was and sure enough he drove past yet again before reversing back into my driveway.

I thought that that would be the end of it and blasted him with one of my sunniest smiles to melt the ice, but I could tell from his face that that wasn’t going to do the trick. And as he was grumbling on and I couldn’t understand a word he was saying anyway, I just took my parcel from him and went off back down the driveway laughing.

I hope that he’d got over it by the time he arrived at the next customer 😕