I think I am going to be very disappointed when I move back to the States. I say this because whenever I am misunderstood or someone is rude to me here, I just think, "Once I am back in the States and everyone speaks English, this will be so much better. There is great customer service there and we are all from the same culture, so we will understand each other." However, now that Kyle and Burt are on the warpath against the U.S. Post Office and United Airlines, I am starting to think differently.
Kyle and I are headed to Croatia on September 11. We bought our tickets with our United frequent flier miles four weeks ago. However, since Kyle's mileage number was listed with an address in the States, they had to send the tickets to his Dalton address -- there was no possibility of e-tickets. A week later they arrived at the Wingfields' house. Burt kindly took them to the Post Office. He debated about Global Priority versus registered mail. The clerk told him registered mail was the most secure, so he went with that.
Well it turns out that the tickets were so registered and secure that the Post Office could never track where they actually were. It took Burt three days of phone calls from Dalton to Chattanooga to Nashville to Washington, D.C., to find the tickets. The Post Office finally admitted that the package had been in Atlanta from August 16 to August 24. It was then sent to Miami and was scheduled to leave on Monday the 28th. However, it did not go out that day, and was grounded again Tuesday because of Hurricane Ernesto. The head of the Post Office in Miami told Burt that he would have sent the package to Brussels that day via FedEx, but FedEx wasn't flying out of Miami either at that point due to the hurricane.
Kyle called United Airlines and explained the situation, asking for the tickets to be re-issued, so that we would have them in time for our flight. But the guy at United said that since Kyle actually knew were the tickets were (sitting in the Post Office in Miami) that he could not re-issue them. Yes, if Kyle had said that the tickets were lost, he could get them re-issued, but since they were sitting in an office that was quite possibly be destroyed by a hurricane at that exact same moment and Kyle knew that, then they could not be. We decided to give the Post Office a few days after the hurricane to get the tickets to us and if they still weren't here by this week, we would then say that we had "lost" them. Finally, they came in the mail today -- 20 days after Burt had mailed them in supposedly the most secure way the U.S. Postal Service knows how. All of this to say, avoid using the Post Office and United Airlines, and don't think that just because something is in English that it will make life easier.
2 comments:
'at a girl, Em!. Kyle said he was thinking about doing a story on this, but I told him we would reach a bigger audience in your blog. Thanks, Burt
i dont think its just the us that goofs up on these things. i had a faily large package sent to to me in belgium. i wasnt home to pick it up so it was sent back to BRUSSELS (when i lived in gent) it took over a week having the package go all over the country and people saying it'll be sent out this afternon, the very next morning,to they dont know where it was to it was found in an "unclaimed package" pile. of course a week isnt 20 days but belgium certainly isnt the size of the US, either.
but i have found that the best way to do international mailing is through companies that generally deal internationaly such as fedex. leave the US postal service to take care of the mailing in the US. because, even that can be a struggle.
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