Our shipment har arrived!

After waiting for two weeks, our shipment arrived Friday. Hurray! I hurried home from work, the local movers carried the boxes in to the flat and made me sign heaps of papers. Neither Norwegian nor American bureaucracy can compete with the Nigerian one. But still happy - soon we would have our stuff. Sofie had missed her Lego and her Play station, and she was looking forward for them to arrive.

I started rigging the computer, and what an amazing sight! I had never seen anything like it. All the cables, the mouse, the web camera, the wireless internet connector were all tangled up in one big messy heap. It took quite some time to untangle. Have the guys packing never heard about packing units like this one and one? I was starting to fear that this was pure laziness. For me it is important to state that this was done in Stavanger, by the moving company chosen by the company I work for, it was not a local Nigerian company. To me, their work seemed very well executed. The local movers looked also rather shocked when the cords were unpacked, but were far to polite to say anything.

The big LCD screen were wrapped in two layers of bubble wrap and shipped. So when it was unpacked and turned on, it was not a big shock for me to see that the screen was broken - I almost anticipated in when I saw how it was wrapped. Oh, how I envy those who use a moving company that would put the screen in a best possible fitting cardboard box and fill it with chips to protect it while shipping.

Our wireless printer was shipped with the ink cartridges inside. I guess I am partly to blame here, assuming that the people sent to my house to pack my electronic equipment would know what they were doing. An assumption I will never again have. I guess that was being over the limit naive. ALMOST everyone knows that the air pressure in an aircraft is different from on the ground. ALMOST everyone I know have experienced ball point pen having ruined clothes if they have been stupid enough to send a shirt with a pen in the pocket in a suitcase (well some are some so stupid that they learn slow - so I myself have experienced it twice). I assumed that this was common knowledge for moving companies that are supposed to deal with air shipment for big companies. So Sofie’s wireless Lexmark arrived filled with ink from the cartridges squashed into every possible hole in the printer. (In case you wonder - it becomes a sticky brown fluid after air travel and the two weeks in custom.) Off course we tried to clean it. But now the printer is declared "death by airfreight". But then again - a printer is easy to get, you can buy the several places in Lagos, so that is not that bad. But it can easily be prevented.

What is really annoying, and partly tragic is the lack of cables to the play station. We have received the hand controls, the Buzz control, the dance mat, the sing star microphones and the memory card and the play station 2 box. But the person packing this has detached the box from the cables, instead of detaching the cables from TV and electrical sockets on the wall. Imagine packing the play station without cables for electricity? Is this laziness or incompetence? Or both? Based on my experience - packing a play station with all relevant parts are so easy that a seven year old can do it. They do not end up in grand mother’s house without the power cable!

What really annoys me is when I reported this to the moving company they respond by sending me a form that they will send to an insurance company and then transfer some money to my bank account.

No understanding of what they do to other peoples property by not having proper routines and training can not just be paid by money. In my opinion - the person who have packed this should be sent shopping for a new screen and the necessary cables to the play station and then shipping it down here with a 24 hours shipping service and a big "Sorry".
And may be use a competent moving company to ship it for them?

But as young Sofie said; "Good for us that we packed the Lego's our self mum, so they haven’t destroyed them". In this setting I chose not to tell her that Lego are carefully constructed so even a Gorilla playing around with them could not break it.

Next time we move the moving company can handle the Lego's, roller-skates, books, DVD's and CD, and stuffed animals. They were capable of that. But my electronics - a moving company will never-ever be allowed to touch without myself supervising them.