Not To Be Trusted With Knives

Boo DHL, Yay Kalev!

January 21, 2011 by Beth

Now, I’m sure I’m not the first person to say this and I won’t be the last, but holy crap DHL Express is the crappiest delivery company ever. You see, Kalev bought me some birthday presents from ThinkGeek and had them shipped to me.  Or at least, he tried to have them shipped to me. But the shipping company used was DHL Express.  Since the package was coming from the US, there was customs owing on it and so I came home on Friday last week to a notice saying that they’d tried to deliver my package, but I wasn’t there to pay up, so why don’t I give them a call?  So I call the number on the notice and end up talking to some guy from the the deep Southern US, who tells me I should call during the day, as apparently the 1-800 on the notice goes to the US if you call at night.  Um, OK. So I call the next day and another American call person tells me I should call the Canadian number.  There’s a Canadian number? I tell her that I called the number on the notice that was left for me and the guy I talked to the day before said if I called during the day I’d get a Canadian office. She tells me that there’s an actual Canadian number I can call ((as it turns out, the 1-800 would have directed to me the Canadian office if I’d called from my cell, but I was calling from Skype and so it wasn’t able to tell that I was in Canada)). Of course, it’s a 905 number – long distance. I have Skype, so long distance doesn’t cost me and so I call it. And I get a voicemail. “This is DHL Express, leave a message after the beep” kind of thing. Except after the beep I get “This mailbox is full.”  Seriously DHL Express? You don’t answer your phones on evenings or weekends – and your voicemail is full? WTF??

Anyway. I call on Monday and find out that my package can be picked up between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. during the week in Burnaby. Because that’s not inconvenient at all. And just to top things off, when I did get out to Burnaby yesterday to pick up my package, I nearly got run over by a reckless DHL truck driver who tore into the parking lot like he was in the Indy 500.

Also amusing was that when I picked the package, there was a letter sealed up in a plastic pouch that was attached to the box:

The letter:

The letter tells me where I need to go to pick up my package and that if I don’t pick it up by Jan 28th, they’ll ship it back to the sender.  Of course, the letter is ATTACHED TO THE PACKAGE. How, exactly, is a letter detailing where I need to go to pick up my package in any way useful when it is attached to said package??  You suck in so many ways, DHL Express. And not even one of those ways are the good way.

But it was all made better when I opened the package, because OMG THESE ARE THE BEST PRESENTS EVER!

First up, there are my new Like & Dislike stamps:

Now I can bring Facebook to life by “Liking” and “Disliking” things – and people – in real life. Expect to be stamped by me soon.

Then there are these awesome stuffed microbes:

You may recall that I already had cold, flu, & Ebola viruses, plus brain cells. These microbes, however, are gonorrhea. So I sent Kalev an email to thank him for giving me the clap!

And then there were three awesome t-shirts ((that last one is very funny if you know Foursquare)):

Look at me at me still blogging when there’s science to do. And your mom.

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