If you're shipping your albums or supplies or anything else, choose the shipping company with care, then keep your fingers crossed. 3 weeks ago tomorrow (so, June 21st), I sent a box of digital scrapbook pages for 4 albums (1 a 220-page birthday present for my dad plus pages for 3 college albums), a bunch of family photos on CDs that I'd promised family I'd bring to the family reunion over the holiday weekend & some other stuff to my dad's in VA so my suitcase wouldn't be overweight & so that it would be there when I arrived.
Sent it via DHL (that's who our company uses, so it was easy) via 2- day air, so it should have arrived on Wednesday the 23rd. I checked via their online tracking on Wednesday afternoon & it said the package had been delivered.
Dad usually calls to let me know when a box I've shipped has arrived, so when I hadn't heard from him by Friday morning, I called him. "What box?" was his response. :::sigh::: So, I called DHL & they contacted the driver. I eventually got a response saying that he'd "left it behind a bush so it couldn't be seen from the street". One problem: there are no bushes in the front yard. Dad went out & looked anyway, as there are some large plants. Nope. No box.
DHL finally said they'd send the driver back out to show them where it was on Saturday. I was traveling all day that day, so had to cross my fingers. He never showed up, so still no box.
During one conversation the gal from DHL whom I was talking to said, "well, maybe he left it under the mat. Um, it was a 9"x12"x4" box. I don't think so. I told her that & she said, "we show it as only 1 lb" (which could mean anything up to 1 lb). At that point I wondered whether they'd put the label on the wrong package. I do put the to/ from info inside the package in case it goes astray & someone opens it. I also put everything in a plastic bag so that if the box gets wet, hopefully the contents (mostly paper in this case) won't. They'd had a good amount of rain between Wednesday when the box was supposedly delivered & Monday morning when I was back on the phone with them. And, if they put the box behind the bush of someone who wasn't expecting anything, it might be days or weeks (or longer) before the owner found it. Jeez!
During one conversation with DHL on Monday, they "confirmed" my delivery address as one in the neighborhood (several streets away) but not the one I'd shipped it to. :::sigh::: They also said that sometime during the day on Monday the driver of that route had returned the truck to DHL & quit, so that 2 supervisors were taking over the route & they'd deliver until 8p when they're done for the day. 8p came & went & still no box.
On Tuesday, as on Monday, I sat working at the kitchen table within sight of the front door. No one ever knocked. Finally, mid-afternoon, after someone else stopped by, I got the idea to check for the box. It was there. After all that, the deliveryperson didn't have the decency to knock on the door to make sure it was received in person. #*(@)%#& At least I finally had it, & thankfully in good condition.
So, I was able to assemble the album for dad & present it at the reunion. Had wanted a cousin who's in college to help me assemble the other 3, but we didn't get that done until over a week later. Plus, I had the family photos CDs to share with cousins at the reunion as I'd promised. Whew!
I think it was Monday, the day before the box arrived, that I'd already gotten a confirmation number showing that I wasn't going to pay for the shipment. (At that point, they should've paid me for my time & trouble. )
So, the day before I left, I now had 3 finished albums to send out. I sure wasn't going to use DHL. And a few weeks earlier a simple birthday card mailed to my dad on Tuesday didn't arrive until the following Monday (missing his birthday), so I wasn't in the mood to try them. Someone I told the DHL story to said they'd had bad luck recently with UPS, so they're en route via FedEx at the moment (I'm keeping my fingers crossed).
I told the guy at the counter while filling out the FedEx paperwork about my DHL saga & he said that DHL is going under. Apparently, they no longer have their own planes. If you ship anything via DHL a far enough distance that it needs a plane to get it there, DHL ships it with UPS, then picks it up near the destination & delivers it from there. My box made it fine via the plane part of the route, it was just driver error at the destination.
So, for anyone shipping anything, good luck! (And be willing to pay a lot more than you're used to.)
Alicia