Sublimity…

I’ve truly become a camera nut, and now that I have a beautiful dSLR (Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT), I’ve discovered the joy of being able to effortlessly take photos, and not worry about film or development costs. However, my recent trips to the Arctic (where I took over 3GB of photos total) showed me that, just like film, there are limits to digital cameras – namely memory cards. Even with two 512MB cards, I’d only about 300 JPEG shots, and now that I’ve discovered and am shooting in the amazing RAW format, I only get about 120 photos out of my two cards. It’s a lot better than 24 exposures on film, but once the cards are full, that’s it. If I hadn’t had my computer with me in
Iglulik to download photos onto each night, I would have had much harder time. Given that I love taking pictures, especially when traveling (when I often don’t have my computer with me), I realized that I needed to find another solution. After much perusal of the forums over at Digital Photography Review (an amazing site), I discovered, and eventually purchased a NEXTO CF. Basically it’s a little battery powered hard drive that I can take anywhere with me and download my photos onto, so after sticking in a 40GB drive, I’ve suddenly got room to take nearly 5000 photos without needing a computer. It’s going to be really handy, especially traveling/hiking around India where I really, really, really don’t want to bring my computer with me on all my trips… So the NEXTO is perfect for me, the only problem is that it’s made in Korea, and only sold there, as well as a few other far-eastern countries. But never fear, eBay to the rescue, where I easily found a guy in Singapore selling them, willing to ship internationally. Paid online, everything went well and my NEXTO was to be shipped FedEx International Priority (1-3 days). Pretty spiffy I thought to myself…

I ordered on Saturday evening, and – being the weekend – it didn’t get processed until Monday morning, but hey, that’s the way life works. It’s all ready to go by noon on Monday, and FedEx takes charge of it at 12:14PM Singapore time. Oh the marvels on online package tracking… Monday afternoon sees my package put on a plane and flown to Memphis, Tennessee where it then gets transfered to a plane going to Ottawa. By midnight (Ottawa time) on Monday, my shipment is in Ottawa – going halfway round the world on short order, not bad! That’s when the fun begins though…

At this point, the shipping gods frown on me, and so some (I’m sure bored stupid) customs officer in Ottawa decides to randomly pick my package as one to actually inspect. They see the retail value of $210 CAD marked on in, and so suddenly – boom, I’m charged $36.73 in GST, PST and brokerage fees. I later learned that there isn’t any real rule about taxes on incoming packages like this, customs stops (& charges) only about half the packages, while the other half goes through free, as if nothing happened. There’s apparently no logic to who gets charged (no threshold dollar value, no origin or destination bias), just a random half of people receiving packages end up paying tax. Anyway, once my package has it’s bill slapped on it, it is released in to the general FedEx package pile as a Canadian citizen, free to continue on to its destination. FedEx puts it on a delivery truck tuesday morning, and it arrives at my house in Ottawa at 12:06PM. Around the world in one day, the only problem is that I’m not home… So it goes back on the truck, and back to the warehouse at the Ottawa airport. I find out as I’m checking the tracking updates at work, 5 minutes away. I figure this is no big deal, either I can get them to leave it at the house for me the next day, or I can go get it somewhere nearby. Apparently not.

So FedEx, what does that really mean? The obvious answer is Federal Express, but you can even dissect this. ‘Express’ is easy, fast, quick – and FedEx is, suddenly it’s there. The problem is that if you’re not suddenly there too, your package zips back on the truck and out of reach again, they’ve got somewhere else to go (apparently they’re so rushed they didn’t even leave a delivery notice, if I hadn’t checked the tracking website, I wouldn’t have known they came). ‘Express’.

‘Federal’ is a little more challenging, but being a government (‘Federal’ government) employee for the past three summers, I’ve come to understand the term. Basically, it means you get the job done, but you don’t really like doing it, have to fill out a billion pieces of paperwork to do anything, and you work according to schedule. You show up to work at 8;30am and finish work at 4:30pm, Monday through Friday, and nothing – NOTHING – will ever make your day any longer, if you’re not done at quitting time, you drop what you’re doing – and suddenly finding yourself finished, go home for the day. ‘Federal’.

So FedEx delivers, but only between 9:30am and 3:30pm (‘Federal’), but they can’t be sure exactly when they’ll come (‘Express’) so you have to be around all day. They can’t leave packages at empty houses (unless you’ve filled out a billion forms and signed not only all your packages, but also your life away – ‘Federal’), so your only option is to go pick it up, at their one central facility – at the Ottawa Airport (‘Express’). So the end result of all this is that I left work early, and spent an hour taking public transportation (at least it went there, thank you OCTranspo – but at least try to be on time next time!) to go to the airport and pay $36.73 to retrieve my package (plus the $1.95 bus fare), and then hop back on the bus for another hour before finally arriving home with my package. FedEx, you can get my package from some random guy in Singapore, to Ottawa (14,808km) in under 24hrs, but you can’t/won’t get your act together so that my package can conveniently get from the Ottawa airport to my house (10.8km) – ever!

In the end, I have my NEXTO so it worked out, but I’m going to seriously reconsider buying anything that’ll have to be shipped ‘FedEx’ again, and I’ll pray to the package gods that customs randomly chooses someone else’s package…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 31st, 2005 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Life in General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.