A quiet wet mid week day

It's been fairly quiet day today at MK BIKES, a late afternoon collection in London yesterday of a van full of boxes bound for a large department stores Milton Keynes distribution centre meant the small Vauxhall Combo van was poised at the gates at 8.30am for the pre arranged booking slot. We were told by the customer that not keeping to this delivery slot would mean the distribution centre would impose a £500 "fine"!!
Surely not? With the way that vehicle journey times can change so quickly in the blink of an eye it seems a little unfair to be penalised to the tune of such an outrageous amount, I suppose that's the power these large companies have over their suppliers, and an essential reason to use a reliable sameday courier.
The motorway users on the M1 late this afternoon are all too aware of how journey times can change so quickly, yet again between the Northampton Junctions of 16-17 heading north bound a multi vehicle collision occurred this time involving 6 vehicles. All 3 lanes of the motorway were closed between Junct 16 to 18, it returned to normal conditions some time around 9pm.
The first motorbike courier job of the day is requested by a new customer who requires legal documents rushed up to a solicitors in Birmingham, despite the collection being almost 20 miles from base our motorbike gets there in under 25 minutes and heads straight up to the destination, the customer is very pleasantly surprised at the speed of delivery when I call to give the proof of delivery (POD) which is the name of the signatory and the time at which it was received.
A supplier to several the F1 racing teams keeps us busy with regular drops several times a week to teams based in the South East, today was no exception with the van heading out with a wait & return job that required goods also heading back to the supplier, then another item heads off by motorcycle courier to do battle with the mid afternoon M25 traffic, two wheels make light work of such busyness (yes it is a real word!) on the outer London Motorway ring road to arrive at the destination in a leafy Surrey suburb.

Slotted nicely in the early afternoon is our daily collection which travels a grand total of 1 mile each day, a run that we have completed on behalf of our customer for the past 6 years.
 We have had several enquiry's today whether that has anything to do when the resurrection of our Google ad-words campaign will remain to be seen, and also a call for a potential customer from yesterday who didn't need a courier in the end but called to thank us for "being there" if she had needed us.

We understand that an urgent same day courier is expensive by comparison to the low cost carriers but these two services are miles apart in terms of service, the term "overnight" is a misleading term as you would be forgiven that it is going to arrive the very next day, many people find to their cost that when it goes wrong with a low cost carrier that mostly delivers the next day it usually goes very wrong with items sometimes missing for days, it is only then that most people find out that these low cost carriers have conditions in their terms & conditions that mean they do not consider the item late until it takes more than  72 hours! Thats a whole 3 days from collection not very helpful when the part needed to be there the very next day. Some of these carriers even have the cheek to add "24" to their name, this doesn't necessarily mean hours in fact it could mean the number of chasing phone calls you will need to make if something goes wrong! Twitter is full of unhappy low cost overnight customers, quite a good way to formulate a decision on whether to use same day or overnight is by searching tweets for them.