ISRAEL: DHL, special deliverance
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God may have delivered Moses many things. He sent 10 plagues upon Pharaoh’s Egypt and delivered the Israelites from slavery, and parted the seas for Moses and his people. He sent him manna from heaven, water from rock and his own words onto tablets of stone.
But he never sent him a printer.
DHL in Israel handles more than 100,000 deliveries every month and say they’ve seen it all. Except for a package sent by ‘Yahweh’ to ‘Moses’ (OK, so the mail’s slow). The information on the shipping bill had an Arizona address for Yahweh and Moses at Mt. Sinai — but in Jerusalem. One would think He would know where Mt. Sinai was, and that Moses didn’t make it into the promised land.
The Israeli side couldn’t decide which was more baffling, the sender or the recipient. Tracing the sender’s address located divinity in a branch of Walgreens in Tucson, AZ, but with a Seattle phone number. By divine coincidence, Moses shares the same zip code (the world was much smaller in those days). But in Israel it belongs to the small Bedouin community of Al Sayyid, a previously unrecognized Bedouin settlement recently granted legal status.
Funny names is one thing, bogus addresses another. With all due respect to celebrity, you can’t be too careful. ‘Israel is exposed to threats. We called the bomb squad for fear the package contained explosives’, explained senior DHL Israel executive Dr.Yisrael Schor to Ilan Gattegno, who first reported the story in the Israel Hayom Hebrew daily. The sappers blew up the package, decimating the contents, which turned out to be a cheap printer.
Walgreens, by the way, have in-house DHL shipping spots.
The mystery hasn’t been entirely solved, though. Someone paid $200 for expedited shipping for a $30 printer. ‘There is no logical explanation for this,’ said Schor.
— Batsheva Sobelman in Jerusalem.
P.S. The Los Angeles Times issues a free daily newsletter with the latest headlines from all over the Middle East, as well as the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can subscribe by logging in at the website here, clicking on the box for ‘LA Times updates,’ and then clicking on the ‘World: Mideast’ box.