Happy Birthday bug!

I thought this story was so amusing that I would post it here so everyone could share it!

You may or may not know that Dec 6th was my brother's 25 birthday. Ben & I decided to get him something special, and in my wanderings through the net I thought I had found the perfect gift!

Mozilla apparently have a "bug" tracking system called bugzilla! Even better they have a t-shirt with bugzilla written on the back and a cute little bug on the front! So our bug could wear it and people he worked with would imagine he was an IT geek, while those of us in the know would imagine him crushing Tokyo!

To order this t-shirt I had to use an online site, where I typed in his address my address, gave them credit card details and so on. Fine, done that before. But when I got to the final screen I was told shipping costs for international shipping had to be calculated and I would then be contacted to confirm the order. Sounds fine. I didn't begin to worry til I clicked the link for more information and looked at their examples...

US$17 for a t-shirt plus US$60 odd for shipping to Australia, plus taxes = approx US$100 ??!!

Then I got an email saying that the order would ship, but with no information about shipping costs! So I replied saying wasn't I supposed to get to see the shipping costs first? I then received an email from them saying that I should not have received the first email because I needed to verify my address... This in reply to an email containing my address, as entered into the webpage! Anyway, I was still curious, so I sent them another email saying yes my address is as listed below, now please send me shipping costs before you send the shirt.

I got an email saying that the shirt had been sent and the shipping costs were $0... I wasn't quite willing to believe that so I replied, asking whether the $0 value was correct and whether the shirt had, in fact, shipped. They replied that no, the shirt had not shipped and it would cost US$56 to do so. Total cost of shipping one t-shirt to the UK US$73!!

So I politely told them to bugger off and asked why the cost was so high. They replied it was because they shipped with UPS which was really quite competitive... Must be something to do with the size of the company because ThinkGeeek's UPS shipping costs were about US$24 to send bug AND Nic's birthday presents to the UK.

Happy birthday guys!