The Book That Didn’t Want To leave My House

Having done the distribution of my previous two books myself; it was a logical step that I would do the distribution of my new book as well. After all, how hard can it be? Someone orders a copy of my book, they pay me via PayPal, I print out an invoice with the word PAID on it, put that together with a book in an envelope, write the address on and take it to the post office. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well, not when there is a book that seemingly doesn’t want to leave your house.

Rodel and me on the deck of the Serenity River in 2003

Those of you, who have read my book, know there is a character in it called Rodel. He was the steward on the ship I worked on, and we became friends and have since kept in contact via letters, emails and texts. He was thrilled at the idea I had written a book about my journey on ‘his’ ship and I promised I would send him a copy once it had come out.
Rodel lives in the Philippines, but due to the nature of his job (he is now a chief cook on ships), he is away from home six months at the time. When my book came out in October, he was on a ship and as I wanted him to have the book as soon as possible, I decided to send the book to the ship.

This is not such a strange thing to do as it sounds, and in the past, I have often sent him letters on board a ship. For the book to reach Rodel, I needed to send the package to the Ariel Rügen Shipping Company in Germany, labelling the address with not only the company’s name, but also Rodel’s name, rank and name of the ship. On arrival at the shipping company, the package would then be send through to an agent in a port the ship would be in the near future, who would then take it on board as soon as the ship arrived.
Rodel was due to disembark from the ship early December, so sending the book to him halfway October, should give it enough time to reach him before he left the ship. I packaged the book, wrote Ariel Rügen’s address on the front, my senders address on the back and took it to the post office on a Monday where it was posted.

The next day, I opened my letterbox and to my surprise found Rodel’s package waiting for me. For some reason, the postal system had mistaken my senders address for that where it was supposed to go and had delivered the book back to my house.
After I had crossed out my senders address on the back and re-written it in tiny letters in a corner, I took the package back to the post office the next day, which was a Wednesday. It was posted again and I was happy that there would still be enough time for the book to reach the ship, before Rodel’s disembarkation.

A week past, and when I went to check my letterbox one day to see if I had gotten any mail, I found a large package that was sent to me from Germany. Puzzled, I opened it, as I had not ordered any books or dvd’s, so wasn’t expecting anything. In the envelope was the package with Rodel’s book that I had sent to the Ariel Rügen Shipping Company the week before. Someone had written ‘can’t send this due to customs error’ on it in German. This was really surprising to me, as I had sent letters and packages to the ship before and they had always forwarded it. Why not now? In any case, was the book, which I had hoped to be well and truly on its way to the ship, back at my house going nowhere.
I felt that time was running out for the book to reach Rodel in time and decided to send it to his home address in the Philippines instead. The next day I went to the post office again – the third time I had done this with this particular package.

When the lady at the post office saw that it had to go to the Philippines, she gave me a green customs sticker on which I filled in that the package contained a book, with the value of about 10 euros. As she stuck the sticker to the package, I realised that previously there had been no customs sticker on it, as packages sent between countries of the European Union, don’t need a sticker. However, obviously when Ariel Rügen had wanted to send the package on to the ship (and then it probably would have gone to Hong Kong), they did need to put a sticker on it and as they didn’t know what was in the package, they sent it back to me instead.

Making a mental note, to stick a customs sticker on a package destined for a ship via Ariel Rügen in the future, I left the post office, in the hope that this time the package would arrive at its intended destination. And so it did! About a week-and-a-half ago, Rodel sent me an email saying that he had arrived back home, finding the book waiting for him.
The old adage ‘third time lucky’ had worked its magic!

Have any of you ever experienced anything funny when posting packages or letters?

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