Larry Hnetka Goes HMmmm

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These boots were made for walking and that's just what they do. My feet are swollen after wearing them often I can't get these boots off.

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This Saturday’s theme is Shoes. Boots qualify as shoes, don’t they?

I bought these boots years ago in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. My friend Bob also bought a pair and so we got what we thought was a good deal on the two pairs.

We were savvy enough to ask for and get the permits to get them through customs on our return home to Vancouver. I went through customs and declared everything including the boots and didn’t even get a second glance from the customs agent.

Bob, on the other hand, made the same declaration but unfortunately he got the Customs-Agent-from-Hell. He said the certificate stating the leather wasn’t from an endangered species was not the correct one. He had three other agents check out the boots. After a couple of hours of deliberation the verdict was that they seized the boots from Bob as they couldn’t verify what type of leather they were made from.

We left the airport that night a tad upset. Me with my boots; Bob without his. Of course we talked to friends about it and we found out items seized by customs were held for three months and then destroyed usually. Bob was having nothing of that. He got five, three-month extensions as we tried to figure out how to convince customs to release the boots.

By the fourth extension, a sympathetic Canadian customs employee gave Bob the name and address of the Mexican official in Mexico City who might assist him in getting the boots released. Bob wrote a letter (in English) and received a short, terse reply in Spanish.

I took the letter to a colleague who had a staff member who immigrated to Canada from Mexico. She scanned the letter and said the bottom line was “sorry, but can’t help out.”

Then she casually asked if we had included a “transaction fee” with the first request. No one had said anything about any fees. She shook her head and asked the value of the boots, then suggested we send a second letter with US cash discretely tucked in to the letter. Of course, no where in the second request did we mention this “transaction fee.”

Bottom line: a month later, a letter arrived from Mexico City with all types of stamps and signatures — again in Spanish. Guessing that it was good news, we took the letter to the Customs warehouse. Sure enough, it was official authorization stating the original certificate was okay and the leather was not from an endangered species.

The Customs Agent went into the bowels of the warehouse to retrieve the boots. As he handed them over to Bob, he shook his head and said in his entire career working with Canada Customs, he had never seen such an approval.

Bob thanked him, grabbed the boots and carried them home — a year and a half later — with satisfaction. The irony of the entire episode though is that Bob never did wear his boots. But that’s a story for another time.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 6:17:06 PM and is filed under JOURNAL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.