Shipping Woes

I’m sat here with a  cup of tea trying to wake up and scanning some blogs. One of my favourites is my friend Moon’s blog which sent me on a not so pleasant trip backwards this morning. She collects vintage sewing machines and has some really nice ones but this morning I saw a post of a sad looking machine who’d been beaten up mugged during shipping. She didn’t say how the girl shipped it, only that the packing was piss poor which brings me back to my run-in with Federal Express. Three or four years ago, I sent my vintage synthesiser to England for upgrading. The thing is 24 years old, weighs a metric ton…seriously-the mainframe (what the keyboard is resting on) is about 120 pounds. This is what it looks like in pristine condition…purdy,ain’t it? This one is Mike Oldfield’s. 

This is not mine-mine is still down at my house. I kept a carful eye on this during the return back to the USA and after it spent about a month at Newark NJ airport clearing customs and they decided it was not a nuclear missile launcher, Fed Ex picked it up and delivered it. When the monkey rang my doorbell I told him…”My parcel is VERY heavy-please wait for me to throw my sneakers on and I will help you.” As I sat to put my sneakers on I heard a loud THWUNK on my front porch and my blood turned to ice. 

The asshole had lifted it himself and dropped it, literally, on end on the front porch. All smiles and proud of himself he said “What’s in here mister, a body?” No you fucking deaf moron…it WAS a vintage synthesizer that in 1985, cost $75,000. What part of I WILL HELP YOU PLEASE WAIT FOR ME did you NOT understand??????

There is a large dent on one end-it still works but he fucked the hard drive up, it clicks and sometimes freezes. I can’t afford to have it replaced partly because I do not know how to transfer the contents of the drive to another one and partly because I can’t justify the cost being that I never get to play anymore. 

Back in the day I had grandiose notions of making music with this. It is a complete music workstation and was used on a lot of records back in the 80’s. The Fairlight was very popular with the British musicians since it came from Australia. I was made aware of it via Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel. Kate brought it in for a bit on Never Forever, used it to prime advantage on The Dreaming and continued with it through The Sensual World. I wonder if she still has hers? It is an awesome piece of musical history to own, especially since there aren’t that many in the world as they were all hand build. 

I STILL would like to clear out space up here at my dad’s to bring it up but my situation right now barely allows me to knit in peace, let alone do music. I have a beautiful baby grand piano rotting in the living because I just am not allowed the peace and solitude to play the damn thing. I miss making music. 

 

Ya gotta love shipping companies, though in Moon’s case, it was an incompetent shipper. 

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