Where is my Fast Tech package?

The simple answer to this is usually 'en route'. However, we do get a lot of peo
ple in the forum constantly fretting about when they'll get their vape mail, and
this ranges from three weeks (legitimate cause for concern in most case), and t
hree days (zero justification, especially when you're posting your bitching on a
Monday). Well, seeing as it's perfectly possible to fly pretty much anywhere in
the world from china in about a day tops, and it's equally doable to send an it
em to and from an airport in the same time, surely three day shipping is a shoe
in, right - that FREE SHIPPING which FT says takes 6-21 days depending on destin
ation? Here's how that would work:
FT receives your order, and immediately pulls the in-stock item off the shelf, p
ackages it, and hands it to the waiting limousine kept running outside their war
ehouse. With police outriders, it speeds through the mean streets of Shenzen to
the Chairman Mao Tractor and Wonton Collective's People's Revolutionary Worker's
memorial airport, where it is whisked through security in a diplomatic bag, and
onto the SR71 Blackbird waiting fueled and ready to go on the tarmac for your p
arcel. As a priority flight, it is given immediate clearance, and takes to the a
ir. As your parcel is the only cargo on this spooky hypersonic flight (and the p
ilot sacrificed bringing his sandwiches with him to make room), it's flying ligh
t, and makes no stops before touching down at the Entitled Round Eye Commemorati
ve Airport some hours later. The flight is met on the tarmac by a motorcycle cou
rier with a Suzuki Hyabusa, who passes unchecked through diplomatic channels, an
d speeds directly to your house. Simple, eh?
OK, in reality there's a great deal of waiting around in store for your parcel.
Despite the Chinese being one of the most industrious people on the planet, ther
e is a chance that your order will not actually be the only one they have receiv
ed. Plus, yours may have hit their system three minutes after their courier has
picked up today's packages for dispatch to the sorting office, so it may not lea
ve for a whole 24 hours; oh the humanity - time to start losing your shit, becau
se that always helps. I mentioned the sorting office, but we are talking a packa
ge going on a plane, which means two things:
1/ Security and customs must be cleared, and guess what? Metal tubes with wires
and often batteries and bottles of liquid, may come under close scrutiny 'becoz
bomz'. Even without that wrinkle, there's a world of red tape, labels, scanning,
more red tape, some poking with sticks to see if it explodes, and some extra re
d tape for good measure.
2/ Remember that this is FREE shipping? well this may come as a surprise to you,
but hours in the air upon a 737 are notoriously spendy. Therefore they don't st
ick three envelopes in a plane because that's all they have handy right now. Wha
t actually happens is that a manifest is constructed until there are just the ri
ght amount of cargo on a flight. This means that if you're lucky, yours is the v
ery last one accepted, and the poor parcel has not even enough time for duty fre
e shopping and pre flight drinkies in the club lounge - that sucker is on a plan
e and gone. Conversely, it could just miss a full flight, and have to sit around
for a week whilst people with flight schedules, scales and tape measures size u
p how and when it will fly.
All that aside, the aforementioned industrious Chinese are seriously efficient a
t shit like this, so if there's a chance it's getting on a plane, it will be the
earliest. However, what's going on at the Entitled Round Eye Memorial Airport?
Whilst the Chinese don't really care about how much things cost, or even the leg
ality of an item in its final destination, that's not the case at the other end.
Customs will do everything in their power to squeeze every little bit of revenu
e out of inbound goods, and get a bit snippy if you're importing opium and machi
ne guns. Your package is therefore put in a police line up with other packages,
so some myopic pen pusher can tap it on the shoulder if it looks a bit like it's
one of the usually suspects - SPOILER ALERT - Kevin Spacey is Kaiser Sos.
After a few days of being guilty until proven innocent (or lost), it's handed to
your local postal service for the remainder of its little adventure. Now, I don
't imagine I can speak for all the world's postal services, and certainly don't
want to cast aspersions on the drooling feckless drones working at The Royal Mai
l in the UK, whose sole aim is to steal/break/lose your stuff; however, this tra
ditionally is your weak link in the whole 'getting my vape mail' thing. Over her
e, we don't have free access to firearms, so our postal workers can't express th
eir existential ennui via the means of a thirty ought six and a clock tower. Ins
tead they break up the monotony by sexually harassing other employees, and stamp
ing on your parcels.
So, what's the best thing to do with your eagerly awaited item? Just Forget abou
t it. Seriously, tracking is not the most reliable process on the planet, and of
ten differs depending on whose system you check - so why even bother unless some
thing's clearly amiss? I have never once checked the tracking of an item PRIOR t
o delivery, but have done now and again just to confirm that it really did take
just six days (which is my record from FT, with sixteen being at the opposite en
d of the scale). Fretting merely raises your blood pressure, and bitching unnece
ssarily pisses everyone off in the forum, and isn't fair on FT - it's rarely if
ever their fault. That said, things do go missing now and again - mostly courtes
y of customs or your own country's post office - so maybe check after about thre
e weeks if you still haven't got it.
One last thing: if something does go missing, FT will have to leap through flami
ng hoops before the carrier will admit any responsibility and process a claim. T
hat can take two months of foot dragging in some cases, which is about how long
it takes most post office customers to say "fuck it" and go away. Don't do that,
but equally try and appreciate that FT is just doing what it has to do in order
to have someone else make good on their fuck up. Also appreciate that English i
sn't FT CS' first language, and they do need you to help them help you. It's a p
ain, but that's how the system works, and crying about it isn't going to speed t
hings up. That said, I've never had a package vanish, though I did receive an em
pty envelope once, which had been opened and not resealed by guess who? UK custo
ms, yay! In that case I sent FT a photo of the envelope complete with the "we st
ole your shit - fuck you loser" sticker, and they had a replacement out the same
day.