Pff, that's nothing pal. Listen to this! (this turned out to be one of the longest posts ever, so brace yourselves)
My sister lives in Norway and since everything is obscenely expensive there she asked me to buy a pair of Bose on-ear headphones for her here and send them over. That way she'd save something like £30, can't remember the exact sum, the headphones cost £120 in my local Bose shop.
Said and done, I bought them and went down to the post office where a friendly member of staff greeted me at the door and asked if I needed any assistance. Needless to say I was quite surprised by the level of service, as they're normally
shite and you have to stand in queue for 20 minutes before anyone will even look at you. He helped me pick a suitable post box and bubble wrap - the latter probably wasn't needed, but with them being brand new and quite expensive I thought I'd play it safe.
Up at the till the woman asked if I wanted to send them by air, I said yes. She then asked what the content of the box was worth and I had to put that down on a wee note - at which point she asked if perhaps I wanted to send it signed for at a extra £5 in case "something happened to the packet during transit", as this would increase my financial cover.
I've sent tonnes of packages across to Sweden and Norway and never had any issues, so I said no thanks. Big mistake. If she had told me just how low the cover was for normal airmail, I would of course have coughed up the fiver.
Three weeks later my sister still hadn't received the package, so I lodged a complaint to see if they could locate the package or reimburse me. Afte phoning them repeatedly as well as communicating by post, I received my cheque yesterday - £43 quid! All in all the headphones+postage+packaging had set me back about £130. Just to make it that little bit worse, they'd gone ahead and spelled by name wrong on the cheque, too. It should also be noted that I sent them on the 13th of SEPTEMBER! Nearly exactly 3 months ago, in other words!
Anyway, I bought a second pair of headphones about a month ago because I felt bad that my sister had to wait so long. I decided to try the post again, so bought the same box and bubble wrap but this time went for the international signed for option as it's supposedly trackable (turns out it isn't, really) and also the cover goes up to something like £500.
I sent the second pair out on the 23rd, and they still have not arrived in Norway. The tracking page on RM's site says that they received my parcel on the 23rd and it is "being processed for delivery abroad".
There is of course no doubt as to what happened with the first pair - they'll probably have been resold over eBay - and to be honest I'm starting to suspect the same is true for the second pair.
Either way, I'm £90 out of pocket for trying to do my sister a favour. Add to that that I'm a student, and you'll see why I love the RM at the moment.
