At lunchtime I drove to the delivery company's depot to collect my shiny new iMac, which arrived yesterday but (surprise) couldn't be delivered since I was out at work.

Driving to the depot is normally my favourite way of collecting failed parcel deliveries; the depots are usually either easy to find in Cambridge or are in nearby villages like Bar Hill, and the latter has held no fear for me ever since Philip's got round to publishing an all-Cambridgeshire street atlas. So it's not too much effort, and it means I get the parcel at my convenience rather than having to arrange myself round the delivery company's convenience (which is even harder when they can't generally tell you in advance whether they plan to deliver at 09:10 or 17:20).

In this case, however, the depot was at Stansted Airport, and the combined faff up and down the M11 stretched my lunch break into an hour and a half without even providing me with lunch. Under these circumstances I would normally have tried a bit harder to arrange an alternative delivery, and indeed I did try having the parcel redirected to my office. No such luck: the courier company refused to redeliver to a different address, not because their own procedures were inflexible but because (apparently) Apple had given explicit instructions that the delivery address should never be changed on their packages. At this point I was faced with driving to Stansted, or taking an entire day off work for the delivery, or repeatedly phoning both Apple and the courier company and trying to get them to communicate to the point where a redelivery to my office could be usefully authorised; so I decided just getting in the car was the least of the evils.

I swear, this is even more hassle than it used to be. The delivery companies aren't getting any more flexible: they still seem to expect people to be in during the day to take deliveries. I suppose if I had a stay-at-home wife that would be fine, but I have no wife at all and even if I did I doubt she'd be a stay-at-home one. But when I ring up, they ask ‘well, will somebody be in?’ (like who, my invisible friend?) and ‘what about leaving it with a neighbour?’ (fat chance, the only neighbour I trust works normal hours as well) and ‘can we leave it in the garage?’ (just because I can afford an iMac doesn't mean I can also afford 100 times as much to have a house with a garage; and furthermore you sent someone to my house yesterday so you could have known this already). Absolutely anything rather than, say, learn to deliver in the evening. I mean, they couldn't do that, that would be useful.

I suppose half the problem is that I'm not the courier company's actual customer; that's Apple, and it's not Apple's problem how much hassle I have to go through to get my delivery, because it doesn't get fed back to them. If only it were Apple's problem that delivery companies are unhelpful to recipients, then they'd have an incentive to give their money to the least unhelpful of them and improvements might be seen.

Still, on the plus side I have actually taken physical possession of my shiny new toy, so things could be a lot worse. On the minus side, my car was ailing noticeably during the excursion; I feel another long lunch break coming on tomorrow, this time to go to the garage…