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One woman's months of planning the perfect Christmas gift for her husband came to a crashing blow earlier this week when a delivery driver dropped it over a fence.
Joyce Moore, 51, had spent the last six months searching for the perfect beer fridge as a gift for her husband when she found a 20kg fridge from Subcold and got it delivered via DPD.
The surprise of the gift was ruined though when she had to ask him to help her move the gift from where it had been dropped and check it over for damage after its fall from the top of their gate.
She said: "Their justification for putting a fridge over a fence was an old preference on the DPD app that I haven't used for a long time and don't even have installed anymore.
"That was when I got Herbalife things delivered a lot and things like that, that certainly wasn't going to injure my dog if things were put over the fence, because we have a dog in the garden.
"It should have rung alarm bells because we had a chaise longue put over the fence a few months back."
Joyce, a procurement officer from Grays, says she had attempted to request the fridge be left elsewhere that morning when prompted to by DPD's notification that her delivery was due to arrive that day, but the old app preferences override those.
In the video of the delivery the driver is clearly struggling to lift the fridge to the height of the fence and get it over, but he does eventually manage to with the help of a shed roof.
Thankfully, Joyce's dog is not in shot at any point and clearly in no danger from the falling fridge.
A replacement fridge was delivered to Joyce on Thursday, December 21.
In statement DPD said: "We are very sorry to hear about Joyce’s experience. We deliver over 200 million parcels a year and incidents such as this are incredibly rare.
"The Your DPD app enables customers to personalise their delivery preferences including specifying a ‘safe place’ for their parcels to be left. Obviously, we would recommend to customers that this should be a ‘safe place’ to leave ALL parcels.
A DPD delivery driver dropped a fridge over a fence (Image: Joyce Moore)
"Joyce’s app preferences instruct the driver to leave the parcel over the side gate if nobody is home. While Joyce had tried to leave instructions for this specific delivery, via DPD’s in-flight options, the app preferences will always override other delivery instructions from the customer.
"In order to remove the preferences, she would need to enter the ‘danger zone’ section on the Your DPD app settings and then deactivate her account. This will then reset everything back to default settings and she would be free to add additional instructions again.
"Our drivers do an incredible job and always try to follow our customers’ instructions but unfortunately, on this occasion, it has resulted in the goods being damaged."
Joyce added: "I had deleted the app and couldn't get back in to it but I would have thought that if I have given someone instructions that morning about how I wanted it delivered that would supersede the app but apparently not.
"But surely with any common sense you'd know lifting 20 kilogrammes above your head is hard and not really safe?"
