THE WALL Redux and The Cat Food

A couple posts back Jim described his surprise to find a new wall blocking the entry gate to the area around the office building at work. This wall meant that people had to walk quite a bit further from the opposite side of the site. This is fine when weather is good, but in the rain it is a bit annoying. We thought the walls might have been added for security reasons, but then later were told that last year the area flooded in a heavy rain and some thought the wall was added to hold back the water if it floods again (though most of rainy season is over). In any case, to Jim's surprise, when he came out of the office Thursday evening, THE WALL was gone and the gate was open and manned just as it had been 10 days earlier! So, it was there for about 10 days. It may have been decided to be too much inconvenience, but no one seems to know.
We also have a long story, which is still baking, about a cat food shipment. Because we have not actually received the food yet, more will come. A friend shipped a bunch of small cans of cat food. She correctly wrote that there were 48 cans in the shipment but the value of each was listed as $100 instead of $1.00, but she did not see that UPS then multiplied those two numbers to get a declared value of $4800! We don't know where the typo occured, but we do not understand how UPS could have shipped this without proper insurance, but they did. It arrived in Bangalore about 10 days later and we were notified by UPS that there is a problem. Because of the high value of the shipment we were told that we have to obtain a special importer's license. We explained that this must be a simple error in the paperwork and they said that this could not be true because the shipper had stated the value to be what the paperwork said. After some discussion they finally said that we had to have our friend re-submit papers in the US with the correct values and this should come through UPS with some sort of invoice number. After a few weeks we finally received papers from our friend (in another UPS envelope) saying that she tried to do what we asked but the US people said that the value had to be corrected here in India! We went back to UPS and explained this and they said they would look into it. After 3 days they said this valuation was taken care of! However, there is another problem. The food was shipped by UPS to Bangalore, but Bangalore Customs is not allowed to clear food items- it should have gone to Chennai! The UPS guy said that the best they could propose was for Jim to write a letter to the Assistant Commissioner of Customs stating that the cat food is for personal us and ask that it be cleared. Jim wrote such a short letter. Then, we were told that we had to take this to the Bangalore Airport Customs office and explain it to the Assistant Customs Director. So, we spent a few hours doing that. It was clear that the UPS people had done little to make the situation clear so, Jim explained as best he could. Finally, the assistant commissioner and one of his aids figured that it was probably OK to approve the clearance since it was for personal use, but Jim had to promise he would not ship food through Bangalore anymore. They did not seem to understand that UPS shipped it to Bangalore and not us. However, they felt that the Commissioner of Customs also needs to approve, which would require a few more days and a complete set of paperwork from UPS. We had to go back to UPS 3 times to speak directly with the guy who seemed to be in charge to get them to get the paperwork to their agent at the airport. This seems to have been done, but it is now a holiday weekend, so we do not know when we will see the cat food. We may have to pay more visits to people and probably pay duty on the food. We shall keep everyone posted!