2008-11-26 - FedEx

Today I finally took the 2x 10kg boxes full of souvenirs I had acquired to the FedEx office. Also coming along for the ride was one of those triangular FedEx tubes, containing some rolled-up canvas paintings and drawings, also souvenirs. I had acquired the boxes and tube on previous visits to the FedEx office – they give them out for free, not the case in Oz I’m fairly sure. They are nice sturdy boxes too, except that the glued together flaps in the bottom come apart instantly, although the box remains structurally sound.

I knew the boxes would cost US$120 each to send – not cheap, but sadly still better than excess baggage charges by a long way. Tube pricing was unknown.

After weighing the boxes and shuffling some stuff from one to the other to get them both to 10kg, they told me I had to fill out one waybill for each box – they can’t sent multiple boxes on the same waybill for some reason. Also had to complete multiple invoice thingos that listed what was in each box, including number of items and value of each item (they assume I can remember these things).

Then they tell me that the tube, which weighs about 4kg, will cost US$140+ to send – are they sure – yes – how come – because it has a large volume – but the box is bigger and weighs more – the box is special - uha. So the paintings are getting carried on the plane.

After this they tell me that both the remaining boxes cannot have the same sender / receiver names on the waybills – no idea why, though it best not to ask. So then I had to change one sender address to the office here (I was using the guesthouse address), and different names at home too.

After all that, they look up a big book of FedEx rules or something, and it says they cannot ship “personal effects” to Australia. They then go out the back to check, and apparently this is incorrect or ignorable.

After all that, finally paid the money and got the customer copy of the waybills. We shall see if the boxes actually arrive…..