CityLink is teh suck!

Posted February 2007

Never, ever, deal with ShittyLink1 if you can avoid it. They were supposed to deliver my new TV on Saturday, but failed to do so. Yesterday I got a card from them in my mailbox, saying they attempted delivery and can I please call this 0870 number to arrange re-delivery (this was odd, since I'd asked the merchant to arrange re-delivery for next Saturday, but that's another rant)?

I call the number. It's, surprise surprise, an automatic phone service. They offer me three options—none of which involves any hope of speaking to a human—in a terribly frustrating way designed to make people give up and chose the first: picking the parcel up from their depot. I'm not prepared to pick up a 32 inch TV and lug it across London when the people that try to make me do so are paid to deliver it to me. So I persevere.

I pick "arrange for re-delivery" from their phone service and don't know whether to laugh or cry when I hear that they don't offer Saturday as an option. I decide to go for the third option, leave your name and number and they will call you back. Do they fuck.

Of course they don't. So I call this morning. First their support person either plays dumb and pretends there is no parcel on record for me, or fails to take down the consignment number correctly. Saved by the bell, the battery runs out of my phone so I don't have to talk to that ass anymore. I call back later having found a phone with more battery, and is instantly put on hold.

Finally being able to speak to a person that acknowledges that they know about a package that was meant to be delivered to me on Saturday. They don't even try to apologise for not delivering, attempting to lay the blame on the sender by claiming it's because it had not arrived with them until Tuesday 6th. Their tracking website clearly says they picked the TV up from the merchant on Friday 2nd but I figure it's not going to give me better service to press that issue further.

The final straw comes when the lady on the other end tells me that I cannot arrange to have the parcel redelivered on Saturday. So, let's see. First they fail to deliver the package when they're supposed to. Then they try to bully me into picking up the package at their depot, doing their job for them. Then they won't let me arrange a re-delivery on a day of the week that's convenient for me, and indeed is the same day of the week they were supposed to deliver the package in the first place.

Adding insult to injury, this experience is not a one-off thing either. It has awaken memories from times past of a Mac PowerBook that was supposed to be delivered to $WORK and spent more than two months in transit between ShittyLink's London depot and our Old Street office.

Why do people continue to use these fuckers? I'm now severely tempted to cancel my purchase and reorder the TV from someone that doesn't use ShittyLink. That way I may get my TV sometime this spring.


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Update 2023: No longer a link, as they're no longer in business. Yay!