Best Laid out Plans

Yesterday, I was planning on doing this for the economy. My friend Julie from Australia was going to help. So you can say that it was international crisis prevention on our part.

But sometimes the best laid out plans don't go the way you want them to. So instead we ended up doing something like this. Before you ask, nope that's not us and we did not actually ride those things. I am too much of a chicken to do this. Although the only person who can convince me to do this would be Julie.







So here is what happened. Saturday morning, Julie discovered that she had to send some important document to Canada. No problemo. Except it had to reach there on Monday. Or else it was pointless.

She spent all morning talking to Federal Express and DHL. Federal Express did not guarantee Monday delivery. So she called DHL. She got different stories from each person she talked to at DHL. Typically DHL is nice enough to come and pick up the packages. But they said that the only way the package would reach on Monday is if she went to the airport and dropped it off.

So I picked her up from her hotel and we went to the airport. Right to the DHL office. The DHL person there told her nope. They were not even equipped to do any paper work. They could not ship anything from there.

Why DHL sent us to the airport we do not know. That should have been the first clue. But did we pay any attention to that? Absolutely not.

The DHL person at the airport recommended going to Walgreen's. Apparently you can drop packages off for DHL there. I had no idea.

So off we raced. To Walgreen's. The guy who helped us was very nice. He went out of his way to help us. But there was so much he could do. When he tried to enter the Canada address, the DHL site refused to accept the address. Why? Because it would only recognize a zip code if it was numeric. And Canadian zip codes contain alphabets.

Oye.

Since we had no alternatives, we abandoned the idea and went to have lunch. It was great catching up and chatting. And the driving around was fun too because we were too busy catching up. It felt like a scavenger hunt.

The Walgreen's guy told us that in the very future, they were no longer going to provide the DHL services. Apparently DHL has changed their mind and want to do in a "different direction".

The black hole. That seems to be their new direction.