CTT won't give me my package from my own store

So I ordered some samples from my online store, like 3 things.

International companies usually randomly pick shippers in Portugal which is the source of all problems of deliveries here.

Generally the tier of delivery companies here is:

• Paack: modern, always arrives properly, but rarely used

• Amazon Prime: also great, always arrives, properly, but Amazon almost NEVER uses it in Portugal

• UPS: nice staff and arrives well

• DPD: they will say you’re not home all the time and instead deliver the packages somewhere to pick up, that is, until you give them some money when you see them, and if you keep the 10 Euro bribes up every month, you will receive your packages (had this with 3 different locations)

• CTT (Correios): the absolute lowest shit-tier of delivery, it’s the old national Portuguese postal service, since privatized

As you might expect, the store, which always arrived well until this time, because this time it picked CTT.

We were home, but we got a CTT note/ticket we were not home (as per usual with CTT) and had to pick it up at the CTT postal office in downtown.

Entering the CTT postal office is like entering a cemetary staffed by witches, the air smells old and funky and reminiscent of rotting corpses, I am not kidding at all. There’s no ventilation. It smells like disease. I usually wait outside cause it’s so bad.

There’s three counters with usually women, aged 50+ and up (this isn’t ageism, this will become more important very soon), post-menopausal, and they hate everyone. I don’t think they hate foreigners in particular, you can say a lot about Portuguese but they’re not racist against other Europeans, and in this case they just hate everyone.

I arrived there with my CTT note/ticket to pick it up, a printed paper of my order invoice, and my passport.

She finds the package: a cardboard box. We cheer “yay”. She cheers “nay”. The woman checked the name of the delivery. It used a pseudonym which resembles my name but exactly, which is for security. I have stalkers and death threats and am a public figure so I have to take OPSEC a bit more seriously.

The name doesn’t exactly match my passport name. So she cannot give me my package.

I defend that I have 1) the CTT note/ticket, 2) I show my electricity bill from EDP which is on my house, 3) the ownership documentation of my house, 4) proof that it came from my own store! And she rejects. “Nao nao nao”.

She cannot give me the box.

I wish I’d just grab it cause it was 10cm in front of me. But if I did, she’d call the police. The police would take 45 minutes to 2 hours to arrive though, giving me enough time to flee. But I bet I wouldn’t be able to enter the CTT office again.

Using a pseudonym is one thing but imagine using your foreign company name. They won’t let you pick up your package.

I told my friend this story and he said he always uses a pseudonym too and his name never matches and he picked up one last week and they didn’t care.

This is the hair pulling thing about Portugal. Rules exist but are inconsistently applied. And if you’re friends and have connections, the rules are completely thrown out the window. If I was friends with the woman at CTT she wouldn’t care and give me my package.

Even worse is the delivery drivers when they DO come to your house, don’t care about your name or even your signature. They just deliver it. Only at the CTT post office they are like this.

And the age thing: people over 50 were born during the Salazar dictatorship that ended in 1974. That dictatorship was based on extreme nepotism. You would go up (and survive) not by merit but by connections. So people below 50 in Portugal are usually okay. Above 50 they’re completely different.