Couriers

It's the run up to Christmas and, for us, that means couriers delivering parcels. More specifically, it means couriers delivering parcels to our house when we're out. Instead of leaving the parcel with a neighbour when we're out, we find that the drivers more often than not just dump the parcel on our mat in plain view to anyone passing by. Not good.

However, we have had a couple of good experiences recently:

• UPS left a parcel with our local collection point, which was our local corner shop. We hadn't come across this before, but it turns out that UPS have local collection points where they will leave your parcel if you're not in. This means that they don't have to re-deliver, and the parcel is held somewhere safe until you pick it up. Perfect.

• But DPD go one step further. On the morning of delivery, we received an email giving us a one-hour time slot. We were told who our driver was (including a photo of him) and we could track his route as he made his journey towards us, which meant that eventually we knew the 15-minute time slot during which he would deliver to us. I had some reservations about what this meant for the driver (lack of autonomy, pressure to deliver exactly when expected, etc.) but in terms of customer service, it was great!

More on motorway signs

Some time ago, I wrote a blog post about the odd messages that you sometimes see displayed on the overhead signs when travelling along the motorway.

Yesterday, travelling home along the M4, we spotted another such message. It read: "Take extra care while driving." As with the previous messages, this sentiment is laudable. But does reading such a sign really have any impact on anyone's driving? Surely, if you're a careful driver, you're a careful driver. And for those people who are not, well, I doubt whether such a reminder is likely to help much.

Of course,  it's good to see these overhead signs being used and displaying some kind of content. But still I can't help feeling that somewhere there's a Highways Agency employee who, in the absence of any earth shattering announcements that absolutely need displaying, is scrabbling to find some (any?) kind of public service information to brighten up our otherwise tedious motorway journeys...