[meteorite-list] Unbelievably late package - my story

[Alexander Seidel]

I did not order many meteorites from e.g. the United States lately, but whenever I did in the more remote past within the last two years or so, delivery was very very very slow - most probably due to German customs, as others have already stated here. It is even likely to happen to be a slow delivery, when you order from a Non-EU country here in Europe like our neighbour (!) Switzerland. Customs almost always seems to be the culprit, and you can´t do a lot about that. When it finally arrives after weeks, you are the lucky one, the one to take a deep breath, as all the time before when you were waiting day after day, you always had to take into consideration the possibility of loss, as customs won´t usually tell you that they have it in their custody...

And then my other advice: NEVER EVER send cash money, not even in tight envelopes! There sometimes are and were big delays in delivery from Non-EU countries, as I just wrote, but as far as I recall I never really lost a meteorite in the mail in all those many years as a collector --- but (..and here is a different "my story"..) once upon a time, many years ago, a three-digit-amount of US-cash was simply lost in a thick light-tight (!) registered (!), well-labelled letter which never ever arrived. This was sent to a well-known oldtime US dealer who did not at all accept credit cards (...won´t tell the name, the oldtime collectors amongst us who know me will probably know who I mean :-)), but well accepted this way to make a transfer on the basis of a divided risk. We came to a gentleman agreement thereafter, so this was settled with no problems, as I was a good customer of him, but then again what can be learnt from this: NEVER EVER send cash money - even not with seemingly se
 cure means like light-tight envelopes, registration or parcels or something like that. 

Well, my 2 cts on this. Best wishes from Berlin/Germany
Alex