Crown Relocations - A Customer's Review

Usually, we use our blog to post happy things - pictures of fun weekends exploring Hong Kong, funny stories about our new jobs or interactions with students. In this case, I'm using our blog for the first time to have a bit of a rant. I promise this won't happen often.

As you can guess, after 3 years in Egypt, we had accumulated quite a bit of stuff. We each had a closet full of clothes. We had a kitchen full of pots, pans, and assorted pieces of pretty pottery that we'd picked up during our travels. (Can you spot the alliteration in that sentence?) When we began to transition out of Egypt, we realized that our household could no longer be moved using just our suitcases. Thus, we decided to hire a "Relocations" company to ship our household goods to Hong Kong. We chose "Crown Relocations," which is apparently the largest relocation company in the world. Our assumption was that Big = Established = Efficient. We were wrong.

Crown picked up nearly all of our worldly belongings on June 17 (Brad's 30th Birthday). They told us that our things would be delivered to our apartment in Hong Kong on July 25 (which was the day we were scheduled to arrive). It sounded like a seamless timetable. We now chuckle at our own naivete. When we got to Hong Kong (on July 25), we called and asked where our things were. A whole host of excuses were given and July 25 turned into August 31. When I called on August 31, the same excuses were given (mostly blaming office staff in Egypt, although with a creative new excuse about the month of Ramadan and its effect on the global container shipping industry), and August 31 turned into September 8. When September 8th rolled around (I'm sure you can guess where this is going)...disappointingly uncreative excuses...September 12th. September 12th turned into September 16 (although at this point, we were assured, "Your shipment just left Singapore"). Well, today is September 16th and I will give a buffalo nickel to anyone that can guess what happened when I phoned Crown Relocations this morning.... Give up? Ok, I'll tell you. The lady (who I won't name, but with whom I am now on a first name basis) informed me that, "There is no record of your shipment." I (Brad) got nicely upset (I'll leave it up to those of you that know me well to guess what that looked and sounded like). She then informed me, "It looks like it is still in Singapore." (I got very nicely upset at this point and for the first time demanded to speak with her supervisor).

After 10 minutes of argument I was talking to the supervisor of Crown Relocations' Hong Kong Inbound Department (lots of jokes went through my mind at this point about the distinction between "Assistant Regional Manager" and "Assistant to the Regional Manager" - I won't bore you with those here). I was quite clear about my disappointment with Crown. I articulated myself with an impressive combination of passion and maturity. I avoided swear words. He listened quietly, expressing empathy at appropriate moments. When I finished my rant, I had achieved a small victory: He promised to "look into it and call me back."

It is now 10AM on September 16th. 53 days have gone by since our shipment was supposed to arrive in Hong Kong. 91 days have gone by since the last time I saw most of my clothes, all of our dishes, and the quilt that my Mom made for Emily and me for our wedding. And it's beginning to look like all of our possessions are making some Somali pirate very happy. Either that, or they are serving as an expensive artificial reef on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Whichever is the case, we are learning to live simply, to hold onto our things loosely, and to have a sense of humor. At this point, we have decided that the only thing we can do in this process is pray. We ask that you join us in this effort.