Blame Canada!

It’s a pain in the ass to send shit to Canada. It really doesn’t seem like it would be. After all, they are just skip and a hop north from here. We have people flying in there on business all the time and it never seems like it’s a big deal. But apparently, you just can’t send stuff to them without jumping some some hoops at the customs stage.

Here is how this started: a dude called me asking for more “Rams” for his computer. I’m not that much into football, and I really have no reason to root for the St. Louis team, but whatever.

Or maybe he was talking about male sheep? I don’t know, but I’m open minded and I’m not gonna hold this against him. I figured he might need more RAM to watch his football and/or bestiality. Windows media player is getting more bloated with every release these days so adding memory seemed like the right thing to do in this situation.

I ordered a band new 512MB DIMM from dell. My football/sheep enthusiast he stopped by the office the other day, and I helped him to install it. I was really hoping that he will use it to watch sports, and not the other thing. :| The machine booted just fine, and was running without any problems so I sent him off on his way.

Next day he had to fly into Canada on an assignment. The laptop worked fine in the airport, and on the plane. But when he got to his destination, and actually had to do some work his machine refused to boot up. Agh.. Stupid asshole memory chip – why couldn’t it fail when he was here and I could have fixed it?!

Removing and replacing the DIMM did not help. So in the end we decided to just take it out and leave it running with just a single DIMM in there. Unfortunately, this essentially downgraded him from the 768MB to mere 256MB. Poor guy is iving in a world of slow right now, with his computer paging out to disk every time he moves a mouse.

I decided to send him back the old memory 256MB DIMM that he left with me in the office. I needed to overnight it, because he would only be there a short amount of time. In the meantime I would try to find out what the hell happened to the brand new 512 chip and order another one.

I filled out the UPS overnight air slip, and spelled out CANADA in big letters in the address field. I even drew a maple leaf and a moose next to it just for a good measure. Unfortunately my maple leaf came out looking like weed, and moose ended up looking retarded so I was pretty sure it’s going to get held up in customs.

Long story short, id did. I had to fill out an invoice form, attach a stupid NAFTA declaration statement, and state the reason for exporting the item. What a major pain in the ass. Even after going through all that, I doubt that he is going to get the memory shipped to him today. Sigh…

[tags]ups, canada, memory, ram, rams, moose, international shipping[/tags]