Another day, another adventure

Very little happens automatically around here. On the plus side, this results in a lot of pleasant experiences involving helpful strangers, but on the minus side it results in a lot of work. I have mentioned earlier bureaucratic challenges, but I still can’t resist posting another story because this one is so completely crazy. As this story unfolded, I thought about how I much fun it would be to write up all the details about sending a pair of broken sunglasses to France for factory service. That only made sense until today, when I finally realized that the story is so confounding, so complex, that you wouldn’t want to read the whole thing.

I have a pair of Maui Jim sunglasses, and they broke at the bridge of my nose. This is not the first time this has happened, and I’m an old hand with the Maui Jim warranty service folks in the USA. This time, however, I thought it would be convenient to order service from Belarus. I was wrong.

Getting the glasses out of here proved to be a problem in the first place because the glasses were expensive and I couldn’t insure them for their full value unless I sent them international express mail. We tore up most of the forms I filled out trying to order priority mail and started anew, in triplicate. Triplicate here doesn’t mean a three-part form that you fill out once. It means a one-part form that you fill out three times. Alla helped me, and it “only” took about half an hour.

I should mention at this point that the mail service hadn’t been my first choice. Originally I called DHL and was prepared to compare their price with UPS and FedEx, but the lady at DHL talked me out of it. She said that if I used a private service I’d have to go to the airport two times to escort my package through customs, once on the way out and once on the way back. The postal service had no such requirement, so it still seems like the right choice.

Unfortunately, Maui Jim France had a different idea, and they used a private service called ChronoPost to return my repaired sunglasses. I learned this on Wednesday evening, when the postal service left a note on our door telling me to come to the main post office for my package. When I went to the post office early on Thursday morning they gave me a different piece of paper and told me to take it to the airport so I could escort my package through customs.

We tried really hard to get ChronoPost’s Belarusian partner to escort my package through customs, but it proved to be a waste of time. I e-mailed to them copies of my passport and several other documents including a Limited Power of Attorney and waited for my glasses to arrive yesterday. As 5:00 approached, Alla called the local ChronoPost rep and asked what was up. Either the call failed at that moment or the guy hung up on her. When she called back moments later, he was out of the office.

Skipping ahead a few steps, we decided to go to the airport ourselves this afternoon. As a matter of principal, I didn’t want to take a taxi because Alla was already alarmed at the mounting cost of this repair, and I had a fresh magazine to read on the bus anyway.

The customs office isn’t “at the airport” in the way you might imagine. It’s about a kilometer’s walk around the back. Getting inside involves passports and tickets, and then more tickets to get into the inner sanctum. In the inner sanctum we had to fill out more forms and negotiate with a customs officer who thought we should pay duty on the incoming glasses. Finally he relented and agreed that if the glasses were indeed repaired and not new, then he’d allow them without duty. My heart sank when they opened the box and the glasses looked awfully-damn-new to me. By this time, however, the customs officer had decided to be a good sport and he filled out the paperwork confirming that my glasses had been repaired. This part of the adventure took about an hour, not including the bus trip and the walk around the airport.

The return trip included its own adventure, since the bus didn’t show up. (We ended up sharing a seven-passenger van with a veritable United Nations of passengers.) I didn’t care, however, because I had my glasses.