To make a long story short, I need to ship important documents to a client, who is visiting relatives in Jordan. The relative’s address she provided is very long and does not have a postal code.
DHL and my office’s courier company are telling me that they cannot ship the package without a postal code. I called the recipient in Jordan, and she speaks fluent English, but has no idea what I’m talking about and insists she has no idea what her postal code is and doesn’t understand why one is needed to send the package.
My client’s cell phone number is not working (she got one in Jordan, where she does not normally live, which her relative provided to me). She is not answering her email. It’s about to be Eid over there and things will be even more dysfunctional than they already are.
I have found several online sources for Jordanian postal codes, but none of them seem to include the neighborhood in Amman where I need to send the package.
AAAAARGHH. Remind me why I do this for a living?
Yours in solidarity with the Huddled Masses, Eva Luna, Immigration Paralegal
Albarakat District. In the meantime I asked for the name of a large business or government office nearby, and will give it a try that way if they respond.
Update: DHL tells me that a) Jordan doesn’t have postal codes; and b) the district name my client provided does not appear on any of their lists. Shoot me now.
I guess I will have to call my client’s relative tomorrow morning and confirm the entire paragraph-long address.
Maybe put a ~validish looking postal code into the form and send it. The people at the other end will ignore it (apparently) and deliver it based on the address.
Update: you and my boss basically simulposted. I didn’t want to call her at nearly midnight Jordan time, but I wanted to get the OK from her before doing this, so it’s what we did. Because everyone is fasting, they are sleeping during the day and up at night, and so when she emailed me finally to ask where the heck her package was, I knew that meant she was awake.
I should explain that because I work in a secure building, we can’t have DHL pick up directly (or have normal courier companies deliver directly to our office), so we have to use a bonded courier company as an interface. International shipments…well, aren’t their strong point. (I figured the problem wasn’t with DHL; at a prior job they used to accomplish feats like getting entire containerloads of spare electronic parts to residential addresses in Siberia in 2 days.)
In the end, it turned out the problem was with our moronic courier company misunderstanding how DHL’s software worked and miscommunicated everything to me. Because the address was so long that our courier company’s software couldn’t accommodate it, I called to ask how I should deal with it, and they told me to abbreviate as best I could. Which I did, last Friday, and arrived Monday to an email that said that my package couldn’t be shipped because it lacked a postal code. Apparently because they interpreted the listed district of Amman as a suburb, and it didn’t appear on their software’s list of possible Amman suburbs, they decided something was wrong with the address and told me it was the missing postal code. Combine that with a recipient not in her home country and without a local cell phone or reliable internet access, an 8-hour time difference, and playing telephone with our moronic courier company, and you get…delays. (I finally called DHL’s local office directly and was told there was absolutely no requirement for Jordanian postal codes. When I passed that info along to our crappy bonded courier company, I got a long apology, and the damn package should finally be on a plane across the Atlantic tonight. And if not, someone’s head is gonna roll!)
So…can anyone recommend a full-service bonded courier company in Chicago? This is not the first time they’ve screwed up a shipment. Once I specified that I wanted something shipped DHL to Lithuania, because I know from a prior job that involved dealing with freight forwarding that DHL is the best in the FSU. The courier ignored my instructions and used FedEx, and my package took a merry 6-country detour through about 8 airports before finally reaching its destination 2 weeks later. I am DONE with these morons, but I need a substitute first.
Haven’t gotten the chance to check yet - dealing with another shipment debacle which is giving me a headache. This is why I went to grad school, you know…to follow up on international courier shipments.
Finally got a chance to check - she picked it up yesterday.
All the same, our courier company has been pissing me off. Today they informed me that I had to use the International Shipping portion of their software (which includes info for duty and Customs forms). For a package I was sending to Puerto Rico. I wonder whether anyone informed the State Department that Puerto Rico is now a foreign country?
Seriously, can anyone recommend a full-service bonded courier company in Chicago that doesn’t suck?
