The week before . . .

“Adventure: pure horror enjoyed from the comfort of retrospect.”   I coincidentally came across this quote just recently, as I was in the throws of preparing for a year long stay in Paris. 

People kept asking me if I was excited.  I was excited about the concept.   However, the reality of it was strangely terrifying, and the logistics completely overwhelming.   It reached its apex a few days before my departure date, as I was figuring out how to ship our boxes.    One might ask why I would not have had this daunting task figured out long before now.     The short answer to this is that I delegated this item of research to my husband (who is perfect in so many ways that I know he’ll forgive me for using him as comic relief). 

My husband Jim is a wonderful guy, who I love and respect.  However, he is very much a big picture person whereas I tend to be more detail oriented.   So, when he researched shipping our personal effects to France, he went to the local UPS store, asked the guy, “do you ship stuff to France?”  To which, the guy replied, “sure, all the time.”  To which my husband said, “great, thanks.”    I really like checking things as “done” on my to do list, and I so wanted it to be this easy.    Ergo, when he told me this, I also said, “great”!

We slowly started packing up our house to get it ready for the renters.   Jim and Allie (the 14 year old), and Charlie (the golden doodle), then set off on a cross country road trip.    Katie (the 16 year old) and I were to meet them in Boston in about two weeks, and then all fly to Paris together.   With half the family gone, and the house less busy, I focused on packing up the rest of our stuff.   I eventually consolidated everything we “needed” into 20 small to medium sized boxes of about 30 pounds each.  I sealed most of them up.   

I knew I was going to need our boxes shipped after I’d already left, so I arranged for our friend/real estate agent to be here when the boxes got picked up.   The only thing left to do was actually go online and create the shipment.  Easy.

I’m about a week away from my departure when I get ready to tackle the UPS site.  It’s a tad confusing, so I decide to call their customer support.   Turns out they don’t do pick-ups for personal shipments, so I’d have to physically take all the boxes to UPS.   But, I won’t be here, and my agent wasn’t expecting that, nor does she have the car capacity to do this.   I could just have our stuff arrive in Paris before us, but that is filled with complications.  
 
I decide to ask our local UPS store (yup, same guy Jim talked to), if they can hold boxes to ship on a specific date?  No.  As an afterthought, I ask him if there will be any issues shipping prescription medications. Well, he’s not sure, but tells me to call Fedex and ask them that question.  To which I say, “wait, you’re UPS, do you use Fedex for your international shipments?”  “No”, he says, “but I don’t know the answer to your question so I would be calling Fedex myself anyway.”  Ok.

I decide to try Fedex, thinking maybe they’re the go to people for my particular situation.  Plus, now I’m worried about the prescriptions.  Not like we have a ton, but I did go through the effort of getting a year’s worth of what we would need.    I’m not even shipping all of them, some will be in our luggage, but still.  I call Fedex customer support and this helpful person tells me I need special approval from the French Ministry of Finance for shipping prescriptions.  Then she proceeds to tell me which medicines are prohibited, spelling them out for me, because, “sorry, but I can’t pronounce these big words.”    Now  I’m getting a little panicked.  Families move their personal belongings internationally all the time.  This can’t be that hard.

I decide my savior will be DHL.  I speak to a very nice person who apologizes for the Fedex lady, saying she was probably assuming I was shipping a full-on box of meds for corporate purposes (though I specified this was a personal move, but whatever).   She tells me that as long as I mark all my boxes as “Personal Effects”, all should be good, and I certainly don’t need any special Finance Ministry form.   However, she tells me that I do need an exact inventory of what is in each box.   Well, that sort of sucks, because I’ve sealed up like ten of them.   But, no worries, I can do this.  Also, they can pick up from my residence.   Perfect!

I unseal the boxes and inventory all the contents (evidently, I’ve bought my kids a lot of clothes).   I proudly log in to DHL to create a shipment.  Breeze through the first part, selecting a pick-up date and putting in my new address in Paris.  Then, they want to know if duties are involved and what my exemption code is.  I click a few boxes I think are correct and this brings me to a page requiring codes.  Codes for each item I’m shipping.   I take a deep breath.  Oh right, I think, as long as I say “personal effects”, I’m good.  So, I type in “personal effects” to get my code and this is what pops up:  “the product description is unknown.”     I type in a few more possibilities:  “personal items”, “household move”, and the like.  I get really weird codes relating to various types of metals and fabric.  Hmm.

I read something recently that said that one of the characteristics of a strong person is that they know when to ask for help.  Well, I don’t know about being strong, but I knew I needed help with this.  It was slowly dawning on me that most people who move internationally either have their work HR department handling all the details, or they are wealthy enough to throw money at a staff of people.    There is probably little demand from the average family for shipping services for an international move, when their reason for moving is “why not” (our best answer when people ask us).   Which would explain why the customer support people so far have been less then informed, and the process is more geared towards commercial shippers.

Anyway, without an HR department or a staff, I did the next best thing and called my friend Lisa.  Lisa is kind and brilliant, but she is an especially good problem solver and remarkably calm in a crisis (ok, this is not a world crisis, but it is my crisis).  No problem she says, we got this.  She comes over the next morning armed with Starbucks and her laptop.  She tells me to go about my business and she’ll handle DHL.  I listen peripherally as she’s digging in.    She gets to the codes and decides to call DHL.  She calls twice and gets two different answers to the code question.   Lisa is smart, as I said, so she figures out a work around to the code thing.  Then she calls DHL again, at which point I hear her say: “but this is your job, you’re supposed to guide me through this process.”    Then, “ I think I need to speak to your supervisor.”  Ultimately Lisa gets told to check the US Census Bureau website if she is so adamant about getting the right code.  The website proves less then helpful, so Lisa actually calls the US Census Bureau (she is a really good friend). 

At this point, I’ve emotionally disconnected myself from the boxes.  I hate the fucking boxes.   I’m ready to put them all in storage.  Screw it.  Jim doesn’t really need his blood pressure pills and I don’t need my menopause cocktail.   We will be in Paris drinking wine, thus alleviating any stresses causing his blood pressure issues or my general bitchiness.

But Lisa carries on.  She nails the code thing (I don’t know how).  Now she is creating the shipment documents and tallying up the cost.   “Susan”, she says, “did you have any idea of what this would cost?”  I actually did, but hearing someone else say it and seeing the look on her face made me realize I need to re-think a few boxes.    Lisa is also a really good packer, so we proceed to open the boxes (again).    Its funny, how when you’re looking at your actions through someone else’s eyes, you realize how ridiculous you are.   Lisa holds up a tube of facial scrub that I love and says to me, while pointing at the label, “you realize that this stuff is actually made in Paris, right?”  So, we start purging boxes and size it down to 14 total.   I eventually leave for our trip and Lisa oversees the departure of the boxes.

I’m now sitting in my Paris flat.   DHL called today and told me that the boxes are in France, sitting in Customs.  Turns out I still need to fill out a few more forms.    So, who knows when (or if) they will actually arrive?  Hopefully before the menopause meds run out.