parcel fuck up

So I thought I'd do a quick update on the parcel I mentioned a few weeks back.

Basically I'd been sent two figurines from Japan and HM Customs made a complete mess of the charges.  The figures themselves were worth less than £90, but they'd somehow managed to work out that I owed them more than £200 in import VAT & other charges.

Clearly this was ridiculous and it was so far off what I should pay I wasn't willing to stump up the money, even if I could have afforded it, which I couldn't.

As such, I filled out the required form and sent it in, including loads of supporting evidence, such as a photocopy of the sticker on the box and e-mails from the company I bought it for showing the real price.  I even worked out what the charges should have been for them.

And of course I heard fuck all back and the parcel was returned to Japan.

I've therefore had to pay again for the figures to be sent to me.  What I did, though, was ask them to split the order and send each figure individually.  Unfortunately, by putting them together in one box last time they had to send it via the airmail tracked service, so it cost a lot of money.  By splitting them up and sending them individually via surface mail it was a lot cheaper.   Although of course I will have to pay twice as much in the way of parcel force charges.

I did also ask parcel force to hang on to the figures for as long as they could, but if they did then it was only a few days over the norm.  I'm also going to be sending them a complaint as I was told I would receive a reminder, but never did.

But the point is it means that the useless fuckers in customs (those who can do, those who can't become civil servants and don't get me started on the immoral robbery that are sales taxes) have cost me extra money  I'm going to send in a complaint, though I may wait until I finally get the figures.

And speaking of which, there was actually another figure that the company sent me shortly after these two but there's no sign of it.  This was sent via surface mail, which can take a while, but I've not had it take this long before.