vinyl junkies alert

A friend of mine runs a (mostly) vinyl record store round the corner from my house. He's closing the shop to concentrate on other stuff (cough ebay cough). As such, he's getting rid of most of the stock for half price or something.

It's Eclectic Records, in Chapel St St Kilda. It's about 4 doors up from Carlisle St, just opposite the St Kilda Police Station.

UPS == cockheaded goatfelchers

So as part of my role in organising last year's OSDC, I was the contact point for O'Reilly. They were extremely generous, and shipped us several thousand dollars worth of books. Rock on. Then the horror began. UPS rang me at 8am that day (this is last October or so) to ask how I wanted to pay the $306 in duty on a parcel from "Ingram". I've never heard of Ingram, nor could UPS tell me anything about them.

A bunch of messing around, and I figured out it was the distributor O'Reilly used. UPS wouldn't release the parcel until the duty was paid. Some messing about with timezones, and a couple of days later, O'Reilly sent a payment authorisation to UPS. Yay. We got books, awesome.

And then today. I get a letter from some debt recovery service saying "You owe UPS $306, and they've been unable to contact you, and we're going to take additional steps". What. The. Fuck.

Ring debt company, explain that UPS are on crack, and that this is not my problem. They insist that it's my problem to fix up. Gee, thanks. Ring UPS. Navigate hellish phone menus. Talk to human. Get told to talk to accounts receivable. Get put through to voicemail.

Meanwhile, hunting through email, I found the email from O'Reilly authorising the payment. Faxed off a copy to debt agency. They still try to tell me that I need to get UPS to agree. Start to get a bit shirty now.

UPS rings back. I read them the details of the email (including the account number it was charged to), decline to go fight with fax machine again to send them a copy. Given that the original email was to them, they already have a copy. Their broken filing system is not my fucking problem. In addition, point out that had it not been paid, they wouldn't have released the parcels, so obviously their systems are teh suck. I don't think I was quite so blunt in stating this, but only just.

Haven't heard back since (this was about 3pm). I'm expecting that this will drag on, endlessly.

In the meantime, I recommend Fedex. Or Australian Air Express. Or anyone, really. Just not fucking UPS.