So, I ordered 6 seasons of Buffy recently, from a Spanish vendor. That was about a month ago. When nothing showed up, I finally contacted the distributor, who sent me the tracking number for the package.

Insofar as I can determine from correos.es, the itinerary went something like this: package left Spain, package went to France, some attempts were made to distribute it (which quite patently failed, since I never actually received it or any message telling me to drop by the post office); and in the absence of any life sign from my part, package went back to Spain. It’s now going back to France for another merry-go-round, insofar as I can tell…

Careful reading of posts which featured people in similar situation unearthed the logic, which goes something like this: the post office provides tracking numbers, therefore you should log in every morning to check where your package is, and nip into the post office to get it if you see it’s there. Last time I tried this, I positively had to seduce the postman to convince him to look into all the packages, since your average French post office sorts packages by day of arrival and not by numbers. Here’s to hoping the situation has changed.

Let’s not even get into the fact that the package doesn’t have an approved French tracking number and thus doesn’t seem to be in the French system at all…

*head-desk*
(though I’m really thankful the distributor paid that little extra for a tracked package, otherwise we’d both be wondering what the blazes had happened)