Going postal

It’s my lucky day, I can’t believe it – today (February 7^th) the fourth and last of my Christmas and Julius-birthday (January 8^th) book purchases arrived. They were mailed from the US and the UK respectively on December 5^th. [English titles at bookstores in our neck of the woods are both scarce and prohibitively expensive.]

Not only was I lucky enough to have this tantalizing and uncertain wait, for 2 of them I had to pay a total of €14 custom’s duties and “postal expenses”. In each case the fee amounted to more than the value of the contents of the packages. But I know after a prior experience, when the postal clerk threatened to return my package to sender if I didn’t pay it, there’s no way around paying these spurious and extortionist “tolls”.

In truth, I’m just thrilled to get everything I ordered. Clearly our multiple begging trips to the post office, along with the considerable time spent waiting on the phone for lethargic and uninterested dispatch clerks – all of which yielded nothing more than indifferent shoulder shrugs – paid off, at least in the sense that we had done our due diligence. I believe that – this time, at least – we appeased the Italian god of the mail sufficiently for him to lift the “hide-it-in-a-dark-corner” spell from our meager packages in one of his random moods.

As for the €14 in tolls, I think I’ve found a way around it – from now on I’ll order my books from the UK (part of the free and easy EU) instead of the states. In fact, I’ve found a bookseller online who delivers FREE from the UK, and whose gross prices are comparable with those in the states. (Their net prices, after taking into account the postal tolls, anguish, enamel loss from frustrated teeth gnashing, and blood pressure medication, are vastly cheaper.) Of course this is all just theory right now, but I’m confident that my latest order of about 10 books is winging its toll-free way to me as I write.

As a result of our regular postal experiences and the effect they have on our mental health, wherever I can these days I pay the extra and ship via UPS, Fedex, or some such trackable means other than USPS (United States Postal Service). Unfortunately these options are not available for online book purchases, and so we’re left to the vagaries of the government postal services.

There’s one anecdote worth mentioning with regard to the one trackable method I won’t use – the USPS. It turns out that the tracking number the USPS uses – and which the customer innocently uses to try and find out where their phantom package is – is changed once it is received by the Italian postal authorities. No one tells you what the new number is. So when you go to the post office or call up the dispatch company, confidently brandishing your USPS tracking number, needless to say they can’t find it, and trump you with a retort that starts something like “without a tracking number …” The defeat is positively humiliating.

Worse still, if and when the package finally turns up and you explain to the postal workers what happened with the number switching, they look at you blankly as if to say, “Yes, and …?”

But I have my books, and if my next batch actually makes it here, I’ll be set with reading material for a while. Ironically, the bulk of the subject matter relates to life in and the culture of this wonderful country I’m living in. At least I’ll be able to verify their tenets and conclusions.