Cargo Gone Awry

Here's a little story about the adventures of a box 24 inches square and 12 inches high:

Before we left on our trip Ed and I put together eight packages to send to ourselves throughout the journey. They contained maps, tourist guides, books for the kids’ schooling that related to the country we would be visiting and some comfort items such as the kids’ favorite foods, shampoo etc. Since they were international shipments, the boxes required an invoice of all the contents to satisfy customs requirements (and ensure that we weren’t perhaps shipping centrifuge parts to foreign nationals?) and an approximate value of the contents. So, we dutifully typed up the forms (all 16 of them), put a guess of value to each item, took them bodily to a delivery company which I will refer to as F___ and asked “Will these do?” The F___ personnel replied that yes the forms were OK but that we should add that the shipments were for personal use and not for resale.... so we added those notes to ourforms. Our first shipment was to go to South Africa. Here is the chronology of our poor little box:

February 16 – Tish, who (thankfully) is taking care of our house, pets, mailings and sanity while we are traveling takes our package weighing 25.6 pounds to a third party (I'll call them K____s) F____ counter.

February 16 evening – K____s calls Ed’s cell phone in Santiago, Chile to say that his account is “Cash Only” and that they can not ship the package.

….many international phone calls to explain that we have had this account for years and that it is most definitely not “Cash Only.”

February 18 – Tish removes package from K____s who still can’t understand how to bill our account and takes it to the F_____ office in Bellevue, who gleefully take the package without further ado and no apparent problems with the account...

February 18 evening – F____ calls Ed’s cell phone in Santiago to say that they can’t ship our package to South Africa since they do not accept shipments of “personal baggage” (see above) and that they are returning the package to our house in Mercer Island.

….many international phone calls to explain that this was the way F_____ had advised us to fill out the forms and to just cross out the word personal and ship the blasted box.

February 19 – Tish sees the familiar package on our front doorstep and probably being just a bit fed up with dealing with it, fills out a new shipping invoice that omits the word ”personal” that F___ asked us to add in the first place, and gives it back to F____.

February 19 – February 26 - The package leaves Seattle (and Tish) alone and makes its way to Cape Town, South Africa. Sometime during this time, F____ charges us $1800 for the first shipping of the package (the one that didn’t go anywhere) based on a package weight of 256 pounds (which is almost more than the combined weight of our kids). …more phone calls… Meanwhile, on the 26th a note goes on our shipping record that a delivery was attempted but not made because of inability to collect outstanding funds - At the time listed for the attempted delivery, we were quietly sitting at home but saw not a soul.

February 27 – We are still waiting for the package. I should note that another package we sent by another delivery service, U__, from Santiago to the US which contained the metals bars of a camera boom (declared in broken Spanish – I hope we didn’t say “rifles” but we well could have) and weighed 50 pounds arrived promptly at our house on Mercer Island 4 days later without any problems. We call the local F___ office and are told that the attempted delivery was actually a phone call to the house caretaker’s cell phone here in South Africa (the cell phone was off), that the additional outstanding funds appear to be some sort of customs duty (about $40) that for some obscure reason can not be charged to our account and that the package could be delivered on Monday March 1 if we "like." At this point the kids don't know whether to celebrate because they won't have their Africa school materials until we're about to leave Cape Town or to pine for the chocolate chips and Mac 'n Cheese that were included in the care package.

We set off in search of the F____ shipping dock for which they don’t seem to have an address (they don’t believe in addresses in South Africa, they just give you suggestions like “it’s near the corner with the bottle shop on one side and the white apartment building on the other (neither of which can be seen approaching the intersection).”

It would all be a great deal easier if we had a map…but of course that’s in the box held captive by F____! Our verbal instructions land us within a 4 km radius of the local F___ office but we can get no farther. Luckily with a cell phone and live turn by turn instructions from a very helpful F____ employee ("keep the brown wall to your left", "pass the market stalls to your right","what color car are you driving?","now can you see me, I'm waving?") we make it to the F____ office where we receive a graceful reception and eventually depart with our somewhat flattened box of goodies.

February 28 - I have cooked up batches of chocolate chip scones, chocolate chip pancakes and other snacks. Hopefully these will keep Ed's spirits up as he puts through more international phone calls to F___ in an effort to convince them that $1800 is a bit steep for a shipment from Bellevue to Mercer Island, especially if they have also billed us for the shipment we rescued from the Cape Town office... so far no luck.

We have since given up on the f____ F____ delivery service and in the future will rely on visits of family and friends to act as pack mules in order to get our supplies (when they "absolutely, positively" have to be there). This has its own challenges but that is a story for another day....