Retrieving the Box

In November I mentioned that UPS had lost the GNOME Events Box. Well, we have retrieved it after we did the investigation that UPS would not do, or did not want to tell us about. I didn’t have time to chase this myself, but I want to thank these people:

Henrique Rodrigues personally went to Odivelas in Portugal and tracked down the box’s physical location. He learned that the (incorrect) receipient had at first assumed that it was one of their regular deliveries and had broken the locks to check what was inside. When they discovered that it wasn’t for them, they told UPS, requesting that they take it away again and give them an official acknowledgment that they had not stolen any of the contents. UPS said No and then told us that they couldn’t retrieve the box and that we should send a claims form with all our receipts. The Box remained in a warehouse belonging to the incorrect recipient.

With this information, Bastien Nocera and Ekaterina Gerasimova contacted UPS repeatedly and in various ways, until they agreed to pick up the box and bring it back to Berlin, where it has now arrived.

UPS are usually very efficient and better than the alternatives. But this was all rather silly.

Looking for a new GNOME Events Box Host

I don’t have the time these days to properly manage the GNOME Events Box, so I’d really like someone else to give it a home. You just need to store it, arrange for UPS delivery, and receive it when it returns. I have generally paid peoples’ expenses when they send it back, and I then ask the GNOME Board for reimbursement for all receipts every now and then.

In the meantime, Canonical have generously paid for (and Bastien organized) a replacement GNOME Events Box, so we now have two. So you might end up hosting both, though I guess that the GNOME Board might choose to send one to another part of the world.