Funnily enough, I was going to mention how it seems that people are just waking up to Fujitsu's role in the whole debacle, and wondering why punishment for them has not been spoken about thus far.

This was HIGNFY in 2021, and it's an excellent summing up.

I had an email from my daughter-in-law this afternoon which included a copy of some Royal Mail tracking info telling her (and me now) that Royal Mail could not gain access at 14:34 this afternoon to deliver something from Moonpig-dot-com which she'd sent me.
Now, I did double check, because of my age and such, but today is definitely Thursday, and Royal Mail's "next working day" is, apparently, Saturday. So I rearranged the delivery, for Saturday, which meant that whatever birthday-related goodies it contains would now arrive post-birthday.

Just after 15:30 my doorbell sounded, and lo and behold it was someone from Royal Mail, with a parcel for me, from Moonpig-dot-com.  I accepted delivery and emailed my daughter-in-law again to tell her it had arrived after all.  She then informed me that "no" this was the "other" parcel, because she'd sent two.

So that's two parcels from the same sender, to the same address, via the same delivery service, delivered separately (almost exactly an hour apart) only one of which was successful.  Obviously my doorbell is working as evidenced by the "second" delivery.  I have no idea WTF Royal Fail are playing at.

Don't forget to send photo evidence of non-delivery

Oh no, Evri are supposedly delivering to me between 8-9 tonight ...

Last time they did this they failed to contact me three times when they drove past my house and item was returned to sender.

Confusing emails from DPD
One order of V-Dog dog food, 4 sacks

Two separate deliveries ... ?

1st around 10am today, second around 2pm
DPD printed tape all over the second one of 30 kilos which looked to have burst open.
Veggie pets fault rather than DPD is my guess

I've been meaning to post this for a couple of days but kept forgetting.

DPD customer service chatbot swears and
calls company 'worst delivery firm'
Musician Ashley Beauchamp was faced with an unhelpful customer service AI chatbot when he started
causing "chaos" and was able to get the bot to amusingly turn against the parcel delivery company.



DPD has disabled its artificial intelligence (AI) online chatbot after a customer was able to make the bot swear and write a poem criticising the parcel delivery company.

Ashley Beauchamp, 30, was trying to track down a missing parcel when he said he was going "round and round in circles" trying to get any sort of information from the company's chatbot.

"It couldn't give me any information about the parcel, it couldn't pass me on to a human, and it couldn't give me the number of their call centre. It didn't seem to be able to do anything useful," Mr Beauchamp, from London, told Sky News.

"I was getting so frustrated at all the things it couldn't do that I tried to find out what it actually could do - and that's when the chaos started."

The classical musician first asked the bot to tell him a joke, and soon, with minimal prompts, it was happily writing poems about DPD's "unreliable" service.



"After a few more prompts it was happy to swear, too," Mr Beauchamp said.

Sharing the wacky conversation on X, Mr Beauchamp said the bot replies to one message saying: "F*** yeah! I'll do my best to be as helpful as possible, even if it means swearing."

In another part of the exchange, the bot calls itself a "useless chatbot that can't help you".



The online post quickly went viral, gaining more than 15,000 likes and one million views in 24 hours.

DPD told Sky News that the customer service chatbot had suffered from an "error" after a system update and it has now been disabled.

"We are aware of this and can confirm that it is from a customer service chatbot. In addition to human customer service, we have operated an AI element within the chat successfully for a number of years," the company said in a statement.

"An error occurred after a system update yesterday. The AI element was immediately disabled and is currently being updated."



When asked what he made of the event, Mr Beauchamp said it was all "very amusing" but AI chatbots need to work on improving lives, not impacting them.

"I think it's really struck a chord with people," he said on Friday.

"These chatbots are supposed to improve our lives, but so often when poorly implemented it just leads to a more frustrating, impersonal experience for the user.

"As a musician, I'm painfully aware of the impact that machine learning and AI will have on my industry - and on the arts in general. I think it is so important that these tools are regulated effectively and are used to improve our lives, not impact negatively on them."

Mr Beauchamp said DPD has not contacted him personally and there is "still no sign" of his missing parcel.

SOURCE

I Robot; fuck yeah.

Annoying much!

Been waiting in all day for a Royal Mail parcel delivery. Just checked tracking and it says "Delivery Attempted - No Answer". Absolute bllx.