Announcing "History of Steel in East Asia"

[Antonio Cejunior]

Originally Posted by wilked aka Khun Deng

Antonio, you can reach Serge through his website www.cozun.com
Dan

Hi Dan,

Thanks very much
Very best

[Rick]

My three containers arrived safely today; all the pieces were fine even though the snoops at customs opened one of them .

Good packing by the museum; kudos !

[Antonio Cejunior]

Great to hear that Rick,

Thank you. It is the staff that deserves the kuddos. They are fantastic.
I would appreciate if everyone would post or email me confirming their shipment being received.
Thanks

[Spunjer]

recieved the swords. my tenegre and visayan sundang became dhas. i didn't open the bubble wraps on those, but one has a jade like stone on the pommel. the barung scabbard was crushed. kris and kampilan are ok.

ron

[Ian]

I have some of Mark's dha and someone else's swords too. Still trying to work out what I have that's not mine.

BTW the jade hilted dha will be mine, Ron.

Ian.

[Antonio Cejunior]

Hi all gentlemen,

I am ina field trip for another entirely different exhibition. Please check at my www.bladesignforum.com

At first when I received this link as I logged in, I thought you were all pulling each other's leg. But unfortunately it is not the case.

Prior to my departure I sent a group email to everyone about my field trip and I must say I am entirely puzzled with what I read here because all boxes received the sword numbers and everything was organized with photographs and so forth.

Miss Victoria has been handling exhibitions for seven years, since the Museum was inaugurated and I can testify of her full qualifications, competence and care. How it happened I cannot explain for she is also right now in a field trip.

I would like to say that due to my son 9 days hospitalization following his operation, I was unable to be at the packaging but it would have not changed anything because Victoria's method at arrival was extremely careful in identigying each tube and each sword to each tube.

I would also like to add that no one has slammed any sword in the scabbard or anything close to this. Care was absolute, but we cannot be responsible for tubes being thrown to the floor by the cargo people, if that happened, because we had requested special care instructions to fantastic Macau FedEx people.

Nonetheless is my duty to apologize for these events to everyone, and since I am away until the very end of the month and have suffered a punctured right foot, almost impalled, my movements are extremely limited as well as my access to the internet.

Again my humble apologies and hope everyone comes out saying what the've got so I can track the mistakes, but presently I cannot do nothing.
As in the beginning, my appreciation and admiration for all of you folks' generosity is the same. I am not the kind who uses people and then forget about them.

I wish to formally express my apologies for any mistakes, but I have no explanation.

Kindest regards to everyone,

[Mark]

Having seen the Museum operations first hand, and met the staff, the mix-up is a bit of a mystery. Mine all arrived safely, by the way, though one package went to someone who is taking good care of them until they can get home.

In my case, what clearly happened was that the shipping invoices got switched between two packages. The package of Ian's swords I got was correctly labelled on the outside with the codes for the swords inside, and the shipping invoice in the plastic envelope stuck to it correctly listed the swords of mine that were mistakingly sent to Ian (in other words, the swords in the box that should have had the invoice). My suspicion, frankly, is that someone at Federal Express mixed up the invoices after accepting the packages from the Museum staff. They have to be taken in and out of the envelopes several times during transit, which is stupid because just this kind of thing can happen (I don't see why they can't put a bar-code sticker on the box itself).

I can't imagine that the Museum staff could have made such a mistake, and more than once, apparently. They even put my swords back in the exact same boxes in which I had shipped them (though most were identical in size and shape). Fed Ex, on the other hand .... In the course of my work I often ship many boxes of documents at once to different parts of the country or the world, and more than once things went wrong. Once one box in a set of five or six ended up in a different country somehow, and another time a box of documents was delivered to the office split open, with footprints on the paper! The courier said he'd gotten it that way (yeah, right).

As many boxes as there were, who do you think is going to mix up and/or damage a box, the guys handling 20 or 30 who knew the contents were precious and fragile, or the guys handling 2,000,000 or 3,000,000 who didn't know and didn't care what the contents were? I just hate the see the Museum staff, who are so conscientious and careful, get the bad rap for how the shipment was handled after they sent it.

[Andrew]

Got my boxes. I'll open them up tonight.

[ibeam]

I received my swords back last week and all acounted for.

Many thanks for their safe return.