I guess I spoke too soon about the import process being smooth. It was, right up until the package arrived in my town. Excuse me in advance, I’m going to vent a bit…
UPS had scheduled my delivery for Wednesday, which would have been fine, but then they rescheduled it for Thursday (today) between 11 and 1. Unfortunately, that was the ONE time during the whole week when I had an important appointment. So I logged on to the UPS website and arranged to have the package held at a UPS facility, paying a charge of $5.99 for the privilege. (That's right, UPS charges extra for NOT delivering your package.)
So this morning I headed down to the UPS facility, planning on picking up the package and running a couple of other errands before my 12:15 appointment. I told the UPS counter person my name and my original delivery address, and in a few minutes she brought out my package, setting it on the counter.
”There's going to be a brokerage fee,” she said. “I've already paid that,” I replied, laying out the printout of my receipt that the website had warned me I might need to produce.
This seemed to flummox the UPS lady, and she disappeared to call a supervisor. When she came back, she said: “We can't accept that. You need to call the international department and have them fax (!?) us a release code.”
She gave me a slip of paper with a phone number written on it, and I'm sure she was hoping I'd go away or dissolve or slay myself or something. Instead I pulled out my iPad, turned the speaker phone up to max, and started trying to call the number. I got stuck in voice mail jail, trying various key phrases such as “international”, “fee”, “import”, etc.., as well as “operator” (which netted the infuriating response, “We know you'd like to speak to someone, but I still need more information.”)
Finally the UPS lady twigged to the fact that I was going to stand there at the counter shouting into an iPad for as long as it took. She got her own counter phone, called the number, spoke the magic words (apparently you have to say “more options” twice to get out of voice mail jail) and reached somebody in the international department. She handed the phone to me and told me to give my information to the person on the other end.
Now I was getting somewhere! I had their phone and had every intention of holding it hostage until I got results. The lady on the other end apparently knew what was going on and asked me for my tracking number and home phone number. Then she said she would try to contact the department that issues release codes and would put me on hold.
I held and held (and held onto their phone) while the phone lady checked back with me occasionally to let me know she was still waiting for the other department to pick up. During one of these chats, she told me that none of this should be necessary because the counter people could see for themselves on my tracking detail page that I had paid the brokerage fee. But on we held. It was getting close to my 12:15 appointment and I was afraid I was going to have to cancel it, but there was no way I was walking out (or giving back their phone) until I had my package, which I still could see sitting on the counter a tantalizing six feet away.
Well, there was a lot more to this saga, but the RFF software decided to log me out and discard the rest, so suffice it to say that it took 40 minutes on hold and another 10 minutes to fax (?!) the number, but I escaped with my package! Unfortunately, now I don't have time to take it home and open it, but I'll keep y'all posted…