I had all but forgotten that I was expecting a new credit card from Australia. So when I finally received it, I looked inquisitively at the postage date on the front of the envelope. It had been posted three and a half months earlier.
Where have you been? I wondered.
Perhaps it had languished somewhere in Australia for a time. I have certainly had the experience of postal staff in Australia having absolutely no idea where Greenland is. And it’s not just countries on the opposite side of the world that are to blame. Just yesterday I had a frustrating conversation with a DHL representative in Denmark about an important package on route to Greenland that DHL had misplaced and which appeared – from the tracking information – to have been diverted to the Faroe Islands. First, the DHL representative had tried returning my call at four thirty in the morning, failing to realize that there is a four hour time difference between Denmark and Greenland. Then, calling back at a more respectable hour, he informed me,
“The package has arrived in the Faroe Islands and is now on route from there to Greenland,”
failing to realize that the Faroe Islands – like Greenland – is not on route to anywhere. It is an end point. I tried explaining this to him, pointing out that there are not, and have never been, any direct flights between the Faroe Islands and Greenland. But despite the fact that I live in Greenland, he was reluctant to take my word for it, prefering to stick with the information from ‘the central office’ in Copenhagen.
“You should call the postal service in the Faroe Islands,” he suggested helpfully, as if the responsibility for his company’s handling of my important documents was now in my hands.
But it’s not always the case that foreign ignorance of Greenland is to blame, as evidenced by the data. My husband likes to collect data and has done so for the thirty or so packages for which he has some tracking information and that he has received in Greenland over the past five years. (Yes, he is a scientist). Though a few packages did languish for a few days and up to ten days in their country of origin (the US being the worst offender), in more than half of cases the longest periods of stagnation in the postage process was once the packages actually reached Greenland. In fact, almost a third of the packages spent a week or more somewhere between their arrival in Kangerlussuaq and their delivery in Nuuk (a one hour, several-times daily flight away). In one striking case, a package spent over two weeks in Greenland before being delivered. So it’s quite possible that my long-awaited and almost forgotten credit card in fact travelled swiftly from Australia only to spend a three month sojourn in the Greenlandic post.
