We’re heading home from Milan this morning, dear readers! Wish us a safe trip and enjoy this week’s links!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Oct. 5, 2007”
Dipnote
Evidently, the U.S. State Department now has a blog, which means is now going to complain about its girlfriend, tell you about how stupid the latest movies are, and post pictures of its pets.
The Phantom Carrier
Monday morning, I headed over to the conference center to make sure our boxes of magazines had arrived. They hadn’t. Since the conference was set to begin on Tuesday, I thought it would be a good time to visit the show’s courier service to find out where our 34 boxes of magazines were.
I was told that half of them, the boxes we shipped directly from our office, were either at “the warehouse” or on their way to the show floor. But they couldn’t be delivered to our booth unless we paid the indeterminate handling fee.
The courier rep had no answer about the 17 boxes of September issues that the printer shipped directly to the show. Oh, he had information on the printer’s name, and the shipper, but the location of the boxes wasn’t so clear. “They may have been returned to customs,” I was told. “You probably should’ve used the official shipper for the conference and not a phantom carrier.”
“A phantom carrier? You mean, UPS is a phantom carrier?”
He gave me a wan smile. By this morning, the boxes from our office (sent via phantom carrier FedEx) had arrived, but the September issues hadn’t. I was livid and decided to put it straight to the rep: “Is there some amount of money that you need to help locate and deliver our boxes?”
Wan smile again: “No, I’m afraid it’s out of our hands.”
I was pissed, and returned to our booth. Over the course of the day, I discovered
- two other magazines — one U.S., one UK — also never received their shipments,
- an exhibitor from Germany learned that their package was damaged and had to be destroyed, but only learned this after they called to find out where their boxes were,
- an exhibitor from the U.S. never received a box because it had mints inside, and Customs was sending it back, and
- another U.S. exhibitor’s 10′ booth shipment (two boxes) showed up a day early to the conference, so it was sent back to customs and one of the boxes was re-routed to Lagos, Nigeria.
There are a bunch of ticked-off exhibitors, including one who arranged to have food service, only to discover that this didn’t include forks, knives, or napkins, for which there would be a surchage.
So, in general, we’re a surly lot. The locals are scamming away, the conference hall layout is insane, and the distance of the center from the city means that we have to travel by metro with Italians during rush hour.