International shipping - oh dear...

[fig]

My street intersects with another street with a very similar name (think “Oaktree road” and “Oakleaf road” or something like that), and at least a few times a week we have to exchange mail with each other.

There’s another street a few towns over with an extremely similar sounding and looking name to mine (think “Mayor word” vs “Major ward” or something like that), so that gets mixed up a lot whenever we have to say our address over the phone, and especially when it’s an automated system either using voice recognition or handwriting recognition.
The town planners really didn’t account for the future when they named everything 150-300 years ago

New New York isn't much better, trust me!

 

[HamishR]

Tayda has been the one reliable source for me in all of this. Because they go from Thailand to Perth with (usually) DHL they get here within the week every time. Mouser too - they ship to me from HK. Both are faster than getting something from Sydney or Melbourne.

There is a street two blocks from mine with a similar name. It's parallel to the street I live on. The post office is actually fine with that but visitors are continually flummoxed.

 

[K Pedals]

One of the previous FV-1 shipments got delivered to the wrong address. After going to two different post offices across town I was told that it was at a particular address and I could go get it if I wanted it.....

There was no offer for them to go get it and deliver it properly, my only choice was to go pick it up myself.... from a random persons house....

Luckily they were cool about it and we laughed it off.

The irony is about a month later I got a package addressed to them... I just cut out the middle man it took it to them. I really should be on USPS payroll at this point.

I had the same thing happen with FedEx…
I had to go to a random persons house and ask for my package… lol

 

[Feral Feline]

I hear you on the exorbitant shipping fees. I've had to cancel many an order when I was in Hong Kong for either reason:

A) Shipping Expense

or

B) Blowing computers'/people's-minds — HK doesn't have postal codes and some websites'/vendors' software cannot compute this fact.
(or 8-digit phone numbers — lotsa sites figure every phone-number in the world should be formatted ###-#### )