[meteorite-list] Unbelievably late package - my story

From: Alexander Seidel <gsac_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Sep 19 15:26:53 2006
Message-ID: <20060919192650.284110_at_gmx.net>

I did not order many meteorites from e.g. the United States lately, but whenever I did in the more remote past within the last two years or so, delivery was very very very slow - most probably due to German customs, as others have already stated here. It is even likely to happen to be a slow delivery, when you order from a Non-EU country here in Europe like our neighbour (!) Switzerland. Customs almost always seems to be the culprit, and you can?t do a lot about that. When it finally arrives after weeks, you are the lucky one, the one to take a deep breath, as all the time before when you were waiting day after day, you always had to take into consideration the possibility of loss, as customs won?t usually tell you that they have it in their custody...

And then my other advice: NEVER EVER send cash money, not even in tight envelopes! There sometimes are and were big delays in delivery from Non-EU countries, as I just wrote, but as far as I recall I never really lost a meteorite in the mail in all those many years as a collector --- but (..and here is a different "my story"..) once upon a time, many years ago, a three-digit-amount of US-cash was simply lost in a thick light-tight (!) registered (!), well-labelled letter which never ever arrived. This was sent to a well-known oldtime US dealer who did not at all accept credit cards (...won?t tell the name, the oldtime collectors amongst us who know me will probably know who I mean :-)), but well accepted this way to make a transfer on the basis of a divided risk. We came to a gentleman agreement thereafter, so this was settled with no problems, as I was a good customer of him, but then again what can be learnt from this: NEVER EVER send cash money - even not with seemingly se
 cure means like light-tight envelopes, registration or parcels or something like that.

Well, my 2 cts on this. Best wishes from Berlin/Germany
Alex
 
Received on Tue 19 Sep 2006 03:26:50 PM PDT