DIR Return Create A Forum - Home
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       Bad Manners and Brimstone
  HTML https://badmanners.createaforum.com
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       *****************************************************
   DIR Return to: Holidays
       *****************************************************
       #Post#: 24500--------------------------------------------------
       Re: Receiving a gift I have to pay for!
   DIR By: Aleko
       Date: January 23, 2019, 2:41 am
       ---------------------------------------------------------
       --- Quote ---
       > looking good so far!
       --- End Quote ---
       Glad to hear it! Earlier on in this thread I did wonder, if he
       routinely sends parcels marked 'Gift' to you (and maybe other
       friends?) across the border, whether the customs guys had
       noticed this traffic and thought 'Ha! A dealer trying to dodge
       the duty by pretending his goods are gifts!' (a not-unusual
       ploy).
       My DH was a UK customs officer when I first knew him, and had
       spent some time in postal customs. He says that everyone thinks
       of postal customs as a vast machine through which their parcel
       will be processed quite anonymously, whereas actually it's just
       a small group of people working together in a room. They do get
       to know regular shippers and the addresses they send to,
       recognise their parcels when they land on the bench, and can
       spot patterns in what they send. (That's how they nailed the
       British squaddie stationed on the Rhine who was trying to
       smuggle a submachine gun home to the UK by posting it to his
       mother one small component at a time.)
       He had lots of stories about that job. About the padded bags
       full of diamonds that used to arrive from Amsterdam to addresses
       in Hatton Garden (the street in London where the trade in
       precious stones is centred). This seemed to me an amazingly
       unsafe way of shipping something so valuable, but he said no. If
       you entrust a packet of diamonds to a security company, or even
       send a trusted employee over with them, its journey is
       trackable, and a well-informed criminal gang can plan to waylay
       the carrier and rob them; but once a Jiffy bag is in the
       ordinary postal system, nobody knows precisely where it is or
       when it will arrive, so no plans can be made to steal it. (This
       was over 30 years ago, and I dare say diamonds are shipped
       differently now. But that's how it was routinely done back then,
       and a customs officer's day might entail pouring a pile of
       diamonds onto his bench and counting them out.)
       Another 'trade secret' that I reckon it's safe to spill now; way
       back then, one of the most popular souvenir items sold in
       Australia was a soft-toy koala bear with a musical-box in its
       tummy that played 'Waltzing Matilda' when handled. The postal
       customs team loathed handling batches of parcels from Australia
       in the run-up to Christmas, because every sack was guaranteed to
       have at least half-a-dozen parcels containing one of these, and
       no matter how carefully you handled them you were nearly sure to
       set the d*mn thing going 'Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda...'
       and there was no way to stop it. The noise just drilled into
       your brain. It got so bad that when someone set one off the
       entire team would yell 'Aargh! Bury it!' and without further
       investigation the packet would be stamped, dropped into the
       onwards bin and have more parcels thrown in on top of it to
       muffle the noise. DH reckons that you could have smuggled just
       about anything from Australia into the UK in December in one of
       those toys; nobody had the fortitude to search them.
       *****************************************************
       Page 4 of 4
   DIR Previous Page