How come I know stuff that large business should but don’t seem to?

Scenario 1 

I wanted to arrange a pick up with UPS the other week. I did it online and got a confirmation email that the parcel would be picked up on the date requested between 11am and 2pm as I had specified.

The day came, the time came and went.

I rang UPS.

The lady on the other end of the phone said I should have read the small print. Pick ups cannot be specified before 2pm - it has to be before 5pm. I pointed out that a) I was too busy to read small print, b) that I had a confirmation email saying all OK and c) why wasn’t there constraints on the drop down alternatives to ensure this kind of thing didn’t happen.

She apologised and said she’d pass my message on to the relevant dept. Haven’t been back to the site to see if they’ve done anything about it though.

Scenario 2

I was talking to a friend who had been trying to book online train tickets through Virgin Rail. He’d been through all the process of inputting dates and times, got to the end and nothing happened.

Tried again.

Nothing happened.

He rang them.

Apparently, even though there were options available online, the timetable was not yet available.

The booking was for 2 months in advance.

Why didn’t they just state as soon as he’d put in the dates ’sorry but you can’t book yet’? It would have saved him a lot of time.

Scenario 3

My parents wanted to book a train trip - guess who with…

They went online and booked but they wanted to reserve seats. There was no facility online so they rang up.

‘Sorry, you have to go to the train station itself to reserve seats’.

The station is a few miles away, traffic to get there is usually awful and isn’t the whole point of online/phone bookings to avoid unecessary trips and making it easy for the customer?

Sometimes don’t you just want to scream?