By Stan Rosenzweig

We found a voicemail message on one of our business lines that had been left at 9:00PM the previous night. When I called the toll free number and repeated back the subject tracking number, the automated system said that the package had been returned after the third attempt. Now, our regular UPS delivery man knows us but had no knowledge of this third attempt; so, we couldn't help but wonder what's going on here, who was this from, how can UPS fail to find us in an office building we've inhabited for seven years, one with our names on the lobby directory?

I called the phone number from the UPS message and got to interact with one of those newly designed, conversationally cute, automaton voices that slowly draws out a series of concerned sounding questions as I thump my foot against the floor to the beat of a college half time band. The automaton allows only four choices, which are: "track a package, ship a package, shipping information, or order supplies". I said "track a package" and it asked for my tracking number. I followed along and recited the number. The machine told me that three attempts had been made and the package had been returned to the sender, whomever he is. That was it. Nobody to speak to, nobody to ask how to get the package, nobody to tell me who the shipper was, so I could reconnect. Nope. Nothing.

We don't get deliveries daily, so I hadn't seen the UPS delivery guy in a couple of days. But, this is the internet era, so I went to www.ups.com to track down the phone number of a breathing human to talk to. No such luck. After drilling down through several web pages, I was able to find the "contact UPS" page where phone numbers have been replace with a fill-in-the-blanks form that requires my usual name, address, tracking number and comments.

But here's the funny thing about relying 100% on automation: no matter how many times I hit the "submit" button, the form refused to send my plea. Instead, it repeatedly came back with this message:

The field highlighted in red, signifying a stupid human error on my part was the one with the tracking number, which, evidently, was good enough for the voice automaton to understand, but not good enough more exacting standards of the web form.

UPS has a pretty good website with lots of informative pages, but I assure you that nowhere is there a place to address any issues that they might not have thought of, such as "this web form ate my homework". UPS provides no way to speak to anyone. In this case, not knowing who sent the package, there was no way to even alert the shipper of a problem.

So the question "What can Brown do for me?", so far, is still unanswered, except to teach me to make sure that you can always get in touch with me, by phone, my mail, by email, or by smoke signal.

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Stan Rosenzweig, president of Office Technology Consulting Inc., Stamford, CT, can be reached through a web form at www.phoneguru.com, or at (203)323-6070, ext. 82409.