No, this post has nothing remotely to do with Valentine’s day even though it comes a day after it. It stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. See this.
I had a package being delivered to me by USPS. I received a tracking number via email, and I decided to check its status. And that’s where the fun began. The internet has become so usable that I was expecting www.usps.com/tracking or something similar to work. But that dumb piece of shit would not work. My options were this:
[1] Google it (or)
[2] Traverse through menus on the USPS website to get to my tracking.
Regardless, the link that works is this:
http://www.usps.com/shipping/trackandconfirm.htm?from=home_header&page=trackandconfirm
I decided to try the other big name courier services: FEDEX, UPS and DHL. The results and my reactions are italicized.
FEDEX → Almost just as expected
fedex.com/tracking automatically redirects itself to fedex.com/Tracking. fedex.com/track did not work though. I am not mightily impressed.
DHL → WOW, I was not expecting this
dhl.com/tracking or dhl.com/track redirects to http://www.dhl.com/publish/g0/en/eshipping/track.high.html. Brilliant, this is how things should be.
UPS → What the _uck, you must be kidding me !!!!!
ups.com/tracking or ups.com/track {mis}directs to http://www.ups.com/content/not_there or a BIG 404 egg-on-your-face. Maybe they are spending way too much time and effort in creating ads and not getting simple things right. If someone from UPS stumbles on this site and reads it, I would hope they would fix it. The last time I checked a URL redirect was not a rocket science.
If you can’t keep it simple, then at least make it simple. Damn it….Things are just supposed to work.
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