If you need to ship something, you can do better than CanPar

Earlier in the month, while wheedling about providing feedback, I mentioned that I would be more or less getting Office 2007 in the mail. Well, unfortunately Microsoft decided to use CanPar as the delivery service, and CanPar screwed me.

Although I had not recieved notice that they came by to deliver my package until today, the CanPar deliveryperson claimed to have had made a previous visit, and that as they had visited twice, my package would be returned to sender. Not only did they not visit twice (or at least left no trace the first time) but what kind of delivery company just does an automatic return to sender like that? Whenever I was unable to recieve something via FedEx, it got warehoused until I could work out arrangements (which once had me actually visit their Scarborough depot). And I've never had problems with arranging return visits with Purolator either. I hear that UPS is also good about this, but I've not used them before.

As a disgruntled "customer" (I didn't choose the service, the guys at Microsoft did) I'm going to give CanPar my two cents tomorrow about all this, and hopefully something might be worked out. But even then, I don't think that I would choose to use them for anything. I'd personally go with Canada Post over CanPar (and it doesn't hurt that I'm related to current and former posties, so I can make heads roll).