A Globetrotting Parcel

Well travelled parcel.

My youngest daughter is living and working in the UK, which means last Christmas was the first she had spent away from family.

Our mob always get together for Christmas.

So we missed her a great deal.

In an attempt to compensate, we selected one small gift from each family member, gift wrapped each, and packed all of them in an Australia Post mailing box.

This was dispatched, together with a separate large envelope containing family photos, well in time to get to the UK for Christmas. Both items were posted on the same day.

Australia Post has an excellent tracking system, and we were able to follow the progress of these items as they made their way to to other side of the globe.

Subsequently my daughter received a card in her letter box letting her know that there was an item waiting for to collect at the local Royal Mail Post Office.

She went to the Post Office expecting two items, but was presented with one - the envelope with the photos. She was more than a little surprised to be told that there was only one item, not two, as I had photographed both packages and messaged the shots to let her know they were on the way.

She demurred, saying that she knew there was a second item, but was told, in no uncertain terms, that if there were two items, she would have received two notifications.

When she told me, I checked the tracker (which by this time had been taken over by UK Royal Mail), and it told me that the second item had arrived at the same time as the first, and was indeed waiting to be collected.

I let my daughter know, who went back to the post office, only to be told that there was no second item.

This process occured one more time, until my daughter began to feel embarrassed by returning to the Post Office without a card. No card - no parcel, apparently.

Eventually the 18 days allowed for an item to be collected expired, and Royal Mail sent the parcel back to Australia. The infuriating aspect of all of this was that both myself and my daughter knew where the item was the whole time, and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it.

Anyway, it has just been delivered to my address (returned to sender) and I am about to reboot the whole process. Hopefully it will get to my daughter by Christmas 2020!

If it does finally get to her, it will have travelled about 48000 kilometres.


Update -

It arrived yesterday.