Mission: FedEx? Mission: Impossible!

A completely unrelated photo. Oh what a carefree day that was ...
With our taxes complete, the next task at hand was to file them. Since TELEFILE and EFILE weren't an option, our only choice was to send them by mail. But I wasn't about to trust my original receipts to Malaysia's post (no offense Malaysia), and since FedEx doesn't have a depot on Pulau Tioman, it was time to head back to the big city. In this case, Kuala Lumpur (KL).

We had originally planned to bypass KL (which is on the west side of the country), and instead head inland and north to Taman Negara National Park. But Taman would just have to wait ... the taxes need to be filed!

We got to KL in good time and -- shockingly! -- during daylight hours. Again, our connections were smooth and hassle-free (we love you Malaysia!). But we arrived on Friday night, the end of the work week. We've obviously been away from the working world for too long already!

Thinking that a drop-off point might be open on a Saturday, we headed out with a list of addresses and telephone numbers from the FedEx website. We ran into problems almost immediately.

1. With only the map in our sad little Book, we couldn't figure out where the offices were actually located.
2. We tried calling them, but couldn't figure out how the public pay phones worked.
3. Once we found a phone that did work, it wouldn't accept the toll-free number for FedEx Malaysia.
4. We found a telephone centre, but the man who worked there couldn't figure out how to get the toll-free number to work.
5. We eventually figured out, after extensive research on the internet, that all but one of the offices were nowhere near us.
6. The office that was sort of near us still wasn't answering their telephone number.
7. After deciding to just go to the store anyway, we found that it was shut tight for the day and, more likely, the weekend.

We finally got a break at a fancy hotel near the store location, the Hotel Istana. (The map on their website is how we found the store in the first place -- go figure.) As they were located in the Central Business District, we assumed that their guests would regularly use a courier service like FedEx, so Ulrik asked them if they had any contact information for FedEx in KL. They did. So after a whole day of chasing our tails, all we had was a new telephone number. And we would have to wait two days until we could use it.

Well, we should have known. When we called the number on Monday, there was no answer. Fortunately, I also had the number for UPS (the guy at our guesthouse helped find it for me), and that number worked. Within two hours of calling them, a guy showed up and picked up our package.

Damn FedEx Malaysia. And damn taxes for being the cause of all this bother.

For more photos, see our Malaysia photo album.