{"id":1681,"date":"2007-10-02T12:04:54","date_gmt":"2007-10-02T17:04:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/the-phantom-carrier\/"},"modified":"2007-10-02T12:06:25","modified_gmt":"2007-10-02T17:06:25","slug":"the-phantom-carrier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/the-phantom-carrier","title":{"rendered":"The Phantom Carrier"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

“A phantom carrier? You mean, UPS<\/a> is a phantom carrier?”<\/p>\n

He gave me a wan smile. By this morning, the boxes from our office (sent via phantom carrier FedEx<\/a>) 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?”<\/p>\n

Wan smile again: “No, I’m afraid it’s out of our hands.”<\/p>\n

I was pissed, and returned to our booth. Over the course of the day, I discovered<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. two other magazines — one U.S., one UK — also never received their shipments,<\/li>\n
  2. 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,<\/li>\n
  3. an exhibitor from the U.S. never received a box because it had mints inside, and Customs was sending it back, and<\/li>\n
  4. 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<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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 … <\/p>\n

    Continue reading “The Phantom Carrier”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27,56,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-business","category-milan","category-travel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4C7K-r7","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1965,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/outerphex","url_meta":{"origin":1681,"position":0},"title":"Outerphex","author":"Gil","date":"March 26, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Sorry for the postlessness, dear readers! I'm down in Philadelphia for the Interphex conference and been busy getting things set up. I've been attending this annual event since 2000 and this is the second time it's been in Philly; all the other years have been in NYC. Not sure why\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1274,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/cereal-killer","url_meta":{"origin":1681,"position":1},"title":"Cereal Killer","author":"Gil","date":"January 4, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Back in November, I wrote about how I've boycotted the large-sized box of Wheaties at our local supermarkets because Alex Rodriguez is the featured athlete. At least I could get by with the 12-oz. box, since I had got no beef with Steve Nash. It just got worse. I hit\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Adventures in Wheaties"","block_context":{"text":"Adventures in Wheaties","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/adventures-in-wheaties"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2564,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/what-it-is-92908","url_meta":{"origin":1681,"position":2},"title":"What It Is: 9\/29\/08","author":"Gil","date":"September 29, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"What I'm reading: Back to Raymond Chandler! Then, who knows? What I'm listening to: Joe Jackson's Rain record What I'm watching: Amy was pretty unwell this weekend, so she watched some chick flicks on Saturday afternoon, before we tuned into the LSU win over Miss State. Don't worry; we TiVo'd\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Joe Jackson\"","block_context":{"text":"Joe Jackson","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/tag\/joe-jackson"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=virtualmemories-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B0012TSCDU","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3575,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/saddest-photos-of-the-week-year-life-etc","url_meta":{"origin":1681,"position":3},"title":"Saddest photos of the week, year, life, etc.","author":"Gil","date":"March 7, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"After moving down the hall to a new office yesterday, I put all of my back issues in magazine boxes. Welcome to the past 10 years of my professional life. No, it doesn't even fill an entire shelf:","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/cpshelf2.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2538,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/tales-from-co-2008-warped-drives","url_meta":{"origin":1681,"position":4},"title":"Tales from C&O 2008: Warped Drives","author":"Gil","date":"September 27, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Our 7th annual Contracting & Outsourcing conference wrapped up at noon on Friday, and the attendees, speakers, and exhibitors all went away happy, as far as we could tell! Success! Our exhibit hall sold out in record time, and this year's attendee count was up 50% from 2007's; we chalked\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-content\/uploads\/usbeyotch.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3677,"url":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/my-next-job-title","url_meta":{"origin":1681,"position":5},"title":"My next job title","author":"Gil","date":"March 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"We get a lot of fun\/strange product-new press releases and conference announcements by mail at our magazines. I find it funny that people spend money on print mail for this stuff, rather than using e-mail, but I guess they think that editors prefer retyping press releases and manually scanning images.\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1681\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}