This is a big (matted to 16x20"!) original I sold at Eurofurence!
Category Artwork (Traditional) / Animal related (non-anthro)
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 1280 x 717px
File Size 157 kB
This piece is hilarious, and strangely reminds me of a few people I know in real life. I was hoping that UPS would have been able to get your stuff to you before the end of AC so I could've bid on some of it, but some things aren't to be I suppose. Of course, I already put very little faith in UPS and only slightly more in FedEx.
True story; about 7 years ago, I had purchased a large (3ft tall) statue of a tiger and has having it shipped from the store to my home a few states away. It was already difficult enough to come across this particular statue, so I was happy to have found it. Upon arrival, I found that part of it was broken so I went through the paperwork of having UPS pay for it and ship me a new one. Attempt #2, broken again and the box looked like someone took a baseball bat to it. Attempt #3, the tiger arrived decapitated with a perfectly rectangular hole in the box that was, oddly, the exact shape of a forklift fork.. After UPS had paid for a total of SEVEN of these statues at nearly $700 a piece, they finally managed to get one to me intact. Moral of the story? ALWAYS get the insurance.
True story; about 7 years ago, I had purchased a large (3ft tall) statue of a tiger and has having it shipped from the store to my home a few states away. It was already difficult enough to come across this particular statue, so I was happy to have found it. Upon arrival, I found that part of it was broken so I went through the paperwork of having UPS pay for it and ship me a new one. Attempt #2, broken again and the box looked like someone took a baseball bat to it. Attempt #3, the tiger arrived decapitated with a perfectly rectangular hole in the box that was, oddly, the exact shape of a forklift fork.. After UPS had paid for a total of SEVEN of these statues at nearly $700 a piece, they finally managed to get one to me intact. Moral of the story? ALWAYS get the insurance.
What happened that got it delayed could've happened with any of the carriers though. Some d-bag working in the warehouse here left it somewhere on the floor instead of sending it along onto the truck. That really sucks, but I'm even more annoyed at the way it was subsequently handled. I was being strung along and promised it'd get delivered on Friday.. which was the 4th of July. Uhuh! So my package was stuck in Kentucky while that entire warehouse was closed that whole weekend. THEN I was promised it would just get rerouted back to where I shipped it from and instead it showed up at the hotel on Monday. If I had an early flight that could have been a whole other adventure!
Your story just sounds like a horrible ordeal. Some of the people working those jobs are so incompetent. D: I can't insure artwork so it could have been an even bigger disaster I suppose. I'd either need a legit appraisal certificate (hah) or the insurance would cost me about as much as I'd stand to profit from the art.
Your story just sounds like a horrible ordeal. Some of the people working those jobs are so incompetent. D: I can't insure artwork so it could have been an even bigger disaster I suppose. I'd either need a legit appraisal certificate (hah) or the insurance would cost me about as much as I'd stand to profit from the art.
You make me nervous saying you shipped this with them...I work in one of their sort facilities now..and unless this is uber-padded in a small iron crate, don't do it again x.x We're told too often to RUSH RUSH RUSH and are paid too little to give much care, even if a box says fragile, glass, etc. (Mind you, /I/ still try to heed such labels, but my coworkers don't seem to even notice them. I'm really surprised anything survives their shipping treatment at all!). Ship it as a hazardous materials item, with clearly indicated orientation arrows, double-walled cardboard, and more padding than you'd need to survive a gorilla, and then you might be safe. I'm sorry we botched your shipping time :(
It was last minute so I really didn't have much choice, unfortunately. Thankfully the matting with foamcore backing is a lot of protection on it's own, all the art was absolutely fine. But yeah, I definitely worry. The thing is, all the other companies do the same, and people handling luggage at the airports do even worse. :(
Well, I am very glad the work was undamaged, but please don't count on the foamcore backing always being enough rigidity/protection o.o;;; I have seen parcels come in to our facility already smashed/crunched/skewered/flattened the wrong way, etc. due to how trucks were stacked, or how loads shifted during transport, not even handled yet by my own unsympathetic coworkers. Package handlers seem to love the thin little boxes for wedges, and they often get crammed where they really shouldn't. To give you an idea how rushed our facility is, anywhere from 1-5 workers (usually 2) get about 1.5 hours to unload anywhere from 1000-3000 packages from a total of 12 trucks, and the trucks often end up coming in at the same time. We don't get the time for much individual care; our objective is to get the box off the truck and onto the plane as fast as humanly possible. Consider yourself lucky up to this point, as, from what I've seen, catastrophic damage is bound to happen at some point :( Now that I have seen inside how things are handled, I'm going to be a nervous wreck the next time I have to ship artwork x.x (borderline makes me want to hand-deliver everything, where possible). I would hate to see your carefully crafted pieces fall victim to shipping damage :(
Yeeesh, sounds dreadful! My box though, isn't a small thin one (and there's a lot of wadded paper and such to fill gaps. It's a very large 25"x25"xsomething (lol can't remember, but it's a bit shorter here) box. It's got some of my dealer's den stuff in there, not only the art show. It's big and heavy, I doubt they'll use it to wedge anything. I think the worst that could happen is they throw it or stack a lot of stuff on top of it, but hopefully the art will be OK. The one I recently sent out to RMFC in Denver doesn't have too many originals in it so I'm not super worried. What worries me more about this process is it getting there on time more than anything. D:
I do imagine a forklift piercing through it though now that someone above has mentioned it. Argh! XD
I do imagine a forklift piercing through it though now that someone above has mentioned it. Argh! XD
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