It is nearly Midnight
My Cellphone Started Ringing
I am wondering who is calling me when it is nearly midnight? I look at the screen of my cellular phone. It is a 1-800 number. Hmm.
I answer, and the caller on the other end is obviously Filipino. She says “Hello, po” and starts speaking in Tagalog. I can speak Cebuano, but not Tagalog. When she stops talking, I tell her that I can’t speak Tagalog. She switches to English.
Balikbayan Box Shipping
She tells me that LBC is offering me a $5 coupon if I will ship a Balikbayan Box through their service.
There is a problem, though. LBC does not have a shipping point within 3 hours of here. I have been wanting to send a box to the Philippines, but there are no nearby locations for shipping. There is one several hours north of here, and one several hours south of here. Both of these shippers seem rather flaky. They rarely answer phone calls or emails. If you are able to talk to them on the phone, they don’t seem very knowledgable or willing to help.
So, I ask the caller… “where can I bring my box for shipping?”
Uh, What?
The lady puts me on hold for a minute. She comes back and says I can bring my Balikbayan Box to Columbus, Ohio to ship it!
Let’s see, Columbus is a 4-hour drive from here. That is even further than the 2 Indiana LBC shippers.
Why are you calling me at this time?
I next told her that it was nearly midnight and why was she calling me at this hour. I don’t even think that is legal for a business to make a solicitation call at midnight.
Her response was that she was baffled. Said that she had no idea that is was so late here. I asked her where she was calling from and she said she was calling from the Philippines. This did surprise me because I thought it was just a Filipino company here in the States making the call. But, still, companies making sales calls should know what time it is where they are calling.
My other question… where did she get my phone number from? She had to know I had some connection to the Philippines.
How far away are you from Winston-Salem, NC?
Hi David. Winston-Salem is 600 miles from here.
They must be hurting for business
LoL. Perhaps they are. But, calling people at midnight is not much of a way to round up new customers!
Hi Bob,
The bane of cell phones is robo calls. I get very strange calls from all over the country from people trying to sell me “stuff”. A lot of them have local phone numbers. My brother-in-law said he had a call the other day from someone and when he looked at the it was his own phone number. I doubt the young knew anything about you.
Hi Tony. You are right, I get all of those kinds of phone calls as well. Those company spoof local numbers to make you think it is a friend, or at least somebody “in town”. However, it is not, most of the time, it is somebody wanting to sell you something. What a pain!
Hi Bob …can you tell the very reason foy why you left Philippines please?
Many reasons. However, the main reason will be apparent when you read this article.
https://www.facebook.com/Fastaction75/
I use this company often, I’ve only contacted them via FB and once I had my boxes delivered in five weeks, normally though 8-12 weeks.
Good luck.
I also in a regular customer, but my patronage was in the Philippines, not sure how they got my number here.
I don’t understand your reply, the company I’m referring to you contacted you directly?
This company most likely will pick up boxes from your house and ship to the Philippines.
When we lived in the Philippines, we had a business “WowPhilippines” which required a lot of shipping and logistics. LBC handled that for us (in addition to shipping Balikbayan Boxes from the US, they are also a major logistics company in the Philippines).
They won’t, unfortunately, pick up boxes from us here, because we live too far from their coverage area.
The link to the company I sent will very likely pick up boxes from our address to ship to the Philippines, had them pick up a box for me just a few hours ago, this is the 5th time I’ve used them.