Editing The Pen Addict 299/transcript (section)

== Pink Love Pen ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' Yes, the podcast nightmare of the Pink Love is over. It was not without drama, but I have it right here in my hand today. I'm using it to take our show notes. So my Bung Box Special Edition Sailor Pro Gear Slim Pink Love 2018 has arrived, which I'm very, very happy about. Hallelujah. It's been quite a drama to get it here, but we have it. But there were two things that occurred during the final stages of procurement. Of course there were. Of course there were. One was a £50 customs bill, which I think might be my most expensive customs charge that I've ever received. I, Brad, I can't work out why they charged me the amount that they did. But I just, at that point, I just couldn't argue anymore. Like, I just, just whatever. Like, that's what it was going to cost, that's what it was going to cost.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I've never had anything from Japan before. I have no idea if for whatever reason that is considered to be different or more expensive. Like, the value of the pen, I think, was written, you know, correctly. And, you know, I've had things of that value shipped before and I haven't got that kind of charge. Maybe that is just what it is and I just don't remember. But I was surprised at the cost, especially because there are, like, two different handling fees, which drive me mad. And then what gets worse is when you pay the fee, they do allow you to choose your delivery day, which you don't typically get from, like, an incoming delivery, right? Like, it just comes when it comes. But you can arrange a delivery day and they didn't deliver it on the arranged date, which was a Friday. So I then had to wait until the Monday for it to show up. So it's like I pay all these handling fees, these two different handling fees, and still doesn't get delivered to me on the right day. But it is here now. I love it very, very much. It is exactly what I was hoping it would be. What I didn't think about, which I'm really pleased with, is the Slim Cosmos, the Purple Slim Cosmos. These are basically the same, like, they're very similar, these pens, right? One is purple and glittery and one is pink and glittery. So they look great next to each other. I'm really excited about that, actually.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, my favorite with the pink is the dark hardware, which they rarely do. I love that, too. That's what makes it so amazing.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I now have two pens with the dark hardware, right? Because the fifth anniversary was dark hardware, too. Ah, right. But what I love about this sweet pink, the sweet love pink, is that they actually write that around the band that goes around the cap. It doesn't say Sailor Pro Gear. It says 2018 sweet love pink, and it has little hearts on it. I like that. I like that a lot. So I'm very, very happy with this pen. Even though this situation has been fraught with drama, it was worth it, because this is what I wanted. This was like, I wouldn't say it was like a grail pen or whatever, but it has been top of my list for months. And it was just serendipity that they ended up selling another one so I could get one. And now I have one. And I'm really, really, really excited about it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Awesome. Yeah, it's an amazing pen. And I lied, I didn't ink mine up last week, but I need to go ink that up before I head to Little Rock tomorrow, which we'll talk about in a minute. Yep. But I'm so glad you have this pen. Honestly, I know it was a complete mess. And the thing that other listeners don't understand and what frustrates me, like hearing you talk about customs fees is not only are they sticking it to you, they're doubling down the challenge of actually getting it. Right? So I wouldn't say it would be fine if it was just, okay, here's your 50 pounds and we're done. It's that now there's even more onus on you to like figure out other things about this challenge. What frustrates me the most. And that's what makes me mad.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Is that when you're tracking a parcel, it says like customs charges raised, right? You have to wait for a letter to arrive. Like just let me pay it online immediately. Like I don't know why I have to wait for this letter to arrive. Like all of these things are just so frustrating. There was actually, so my next little thing that I wanted to talk about actually also has some customs fund to it. Um, this is from a listener by the name of Alan who contacted me out of the blue and he said, I've been trying, you know, I've been tooling around, playing around with some woodworking stuff. And I want to make you some personalized blocks for your pens to go in, um, and like make large holes and stuff so you can fit your canalea pens and all that sort of stuff in. I was like, okay, great. Like if that's something you want to do, like I would love that. Um, and then Alan sent it to me and this was like a whole big situation. Like for, for a while I've been wanting to get a PO box so people can send me stuff. So I've sorted out this PO box, set it all up, sent the information to Alan and then found out that Parcel Force, which is one of the UK package carriers, which is part of the Royal Mail group, will not deliver to post PO boxes.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Even though it's a Royal Mail PO box that I set up because it's not a real PO box with the Royal Mail. Um, they just deliver it to you. It's like a, it's like a fake address basically. But even though it's not an actual real box, Parcel Force won't deliver it. So I now have a useless PO box for six months because there's no point in me giving this out because every single time that someone tries to send me something, it's like a toss up as to whether the Royal Mail or Parcel Force will deliver it. And if Parcel Force are delivering it, it will go through this system, which has taken me and Alan three weeks. This, this thing has been in the UK for three weeks. And the poor guy. Is Alan in the US? Is it coming from the US? The poor guy paid customs charges on my behalf, which was very kind of him. And I ended up having to get it like sent to a post office. I had to call them. It was like a real, it was a real mess, but it was worth it because I now, I've now replaced all of my pen stands on my desk with these two fantastic pen, pen stands. One is Relay FM. One says Myke was right. And I now have more space than ever. And all of my kind of big bodied pens have space in these. So I'm really, really excited about this. And I wanted to thank Alan for sending these to me. And Brad, you can see, I put a picture of my current situation going on there. I have a redacted pen. You notice that?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's my favorite thing. Yeah, you know what that is. People started replying to it and like, what's going on with the picture? And then Myke's like, well, I had to redact the pen and I know exactly what pen it is.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Honestly, I couldn't be bothered to take the picture again. So I kind of just thought, this is fun. I'll do this instead. It was fun. I'm glad you did that. That pen will become clear about that very soon, actually. Very soon. So we'll be able to talk about that. That's something that me and you are excited to talk about. But yeah, so this is my current situation. Look at all those beautiful sailors right at the front.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, we're going to talk about this. I want to circle back to this picture before we really dig into it. There's a question later because we're going to do a mostly Ask TPA show this week. And one of it's kind of about what we're currently using. So I want to refer to this picture. But I want to say two things. Number one, looking at Alan's picture versus your picture, it looks like the pen holder is like the size of a die, the way it's kind of staged in the photo. It looks tiny, doesn't it? Then you flip over to your picture and it's like the size of a head. Yeah, it's a beast. Or a grapefruit or something. It is a beast.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It's huge.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's really big. But I love it, right?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I don't know why, but I love that it's so huge.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, I was like, wow, those pen slots are tiny except the perspective's off on the picture. Yeah. Like it fits the big retro 51s with room to spare. It's kind of funny.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I can fit my Canalea pens in those holes. Yeah. Right. So like these are serious. Like these are pretty serious. So yeah, I'm very excited about these. And I thought it was worth thanking Alan on the show just because of the mess that he had to go through just to do something nice for me. So I really appreciate that. Yeah. But so this is me saying I'm very sorry, but like I hoped I was going to get a PO box set up. I don't know what I'm going to do about that. I'm probably never going to have one now because the parcel force situation, I don't, nobody wants to have to deal with that every time. And it's a real shame because I've wanted to have one so people could send me letters and stuff like that even. Right. But setting up a PO box and every time having to say, please don't send me parcels or only send me parcels via DHL. It's like it's too much. So it is. I'm looking into other options like for like third party companies that do it, like where there's actually a place to deliver. And it's like so it's not a PO box address, but like it's like a secondary. You know what I mean? Right. Right. It's like it's got an actual address and then that company just holds on to stuff for me. So I'm still looking into that now, but I have a useless PO box for the next five months.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So that brings up my second point. And we've talked about this before is we need another podcast called I Hate the Mail. Yeah. Because we talk about we've talked about my shipping troubles with Nock and Pen Addict. We've talked about your customs issues and we could even include email because you're going through a challenge right now and I'm perpetually challenged by email. So, yeah, we need to make that that podcast happen one of these days. But we have talked about it before. It would just be like a total bitch session about mailing services, analog or digital. So, yeah, we'll work on that. I worked on leaving you last week, Myke. It didn't work out because I am here today. But I was seriously considering making the jump over to the Erasable podcast. I was on Erasable number 91. Did you get a chance to listen to that? Probably not. You don't like pencils.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I haven't listened to it yet, no. I didn't actually know the episode was out. I knew the episode was coming out, but I haven't checked it out yet.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So, you were actually kind enough to record an intro for the show. Andy, Andy Wellfley was not on the episode last week. So, they asked me to fill in with Johnny and Tim. And Andy, while we were all chatting about this, Andy had a funny little comment. He's like, we should get Myke to record the intro. And we all just thought it was great. So, we sent over a little bit to you to record for that show. And I thought it came out wonderfully.

'''Myke Hurley:''' This is a perfect example of my blind trust in you.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Because you just said, can you just record this?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I'm like, all right. I sent you like two sentences of text. I said, record this, send me the file.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right? And I had it within 30 seconds. You're like, okay. Bloop. But it was fun. I enjoyed talking to them. I giggled a lot during the show, which I like to do. And I re-listened to it yesterday in my travels. And I giggled some more. So, whenever I giggle during a podcast, you know it's a fun podcast. So, thank you guys for having me. And we'll have to complete that trade. And we've had Andy on the show. So, we'll have to see about getting Johnny and Tim on the show in the future. So, it was fun. Go listen to it. Link's in the show notes. And I wanted to discuss really quickly, related to that podcast episode, I talked about the Uni Mitsubishi 9000 pencil in 3H lead grade, which is very, very hard. It's on the very firm and light side of the scale. I did a review of that pencil for the Pen Addict on Monday. And if you haven't read that review, I'm not that big of an in-case-you-missed-it guy. Like, I don't retweet myself on Twitter or, you know, constantly post my article, you know, like all through the week and things like that in case you missed it. But this was a good one because I thought I just had fun writing it because it's such a weird pencil, but it goes to, like, the core of what I believe in when I'm finding stuff for myself.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You had a bit more of a story to tell than just talking about the pencil, which I liked.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah. So, I had fun writing this review and you should all go read it because it gives you a little bit of insight about how my brain works, which is honestly kind of a mess. And it came out, spilled over to the page this time. But now you read that and you'll understand a little bit more why I am who I am and why this stuff is important to me. So, that was a fun review to write. And that's one of those things where I had no intention of reviewing that pencil. Then I started writing the review and then that's what came out of my head, right? There was no pre-planning to it. I just started typing and that's what happened. And that's how that appears from time to time. It's not just a straight review of tech specs and performance and things like that. This was more of a touchy-feely review. And I don't know. I'm proud of it, even though it was just like this little simple funny thing. I enjoyed it. And I like looking back on that one. So, that's going to be one I'll bookmark for future reference for my own sake. So, yeah. I enjoyed it.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Awesome.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right. So, a couple more things before we get into all these questions. We got a lot of questions, too. I am heading to Little Rock for the Arkansas Pen Show tomorrow. It is from Friday through Sunday in Little Rock, Arkansas. I will be there. Anna will be there. Matt Armstrong will be there. Lisa Van Ness will be there. Michael Soule will be there. Jimmy Dolliv will be there. Lots of people are going to be there. I'm leaving a bunch of people out. Sean Newton. It's a cool show because it's so small and quaint. You get to kind of hang out and do lots of things. I just go to hang out and help Lisa with Van Ness Pens. They have an open house on Friday night. I help out with that event. And I do a little party after Saturday night in the bar, which I like to do. But if you want to follow me on Anchor, which is this really neat little podcasting service where you can just upload quick files and they turn them into basically an episode, I'm going to try to road trip. I'm driving on this trip. So in Baltimore, I end up getting busy and not recording as many Anchor episodes as I wanted to. I'm going to record from the car whenever something pops into my head, which is super dangerous. So check it out tomorrow. I'll have links in the show notes. I'm trying to leave at like 5 a.m. tomorrow morning. So hopefully you will see a quick episode of how bad of an idea that is tomorrow morning. But that's kind of my thought. I'm going to drive. It's about an eight to nine hour drive. So I don't know. I might be two episodes. It might be once every hour as I'm anxious about going on this trip. So I'll do that. Then I'll have some more from the show itself and then probably on the way back too. So check me out on Anchor. Follow me over there and enjoy the fun.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. Anchor is really great. They are a RelayFM sponsor, which I do want to mention. I'm just. Yes. Sorry. I'll mention that. No, it's no. Don't apologize. I like that you're using it, but I do just want to mention that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, I didn't realize that. I knew you had a. What would you call?

'''Myke Hurley:''' We have an agreement. An arrangement. We were a launch partner of their new platform. Yes. We have a show called Subnet, which is a daily tech show, which you can get at Relay.FM slash subnet. But it's also available on smart speakers as well, which is the first show that we've done because it's one of these like headline shows. Right. So we're doing that. But yeah, they have been a sponsor on some shows and we have worked with them on this project too. So I just wanted to mention that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yes. Thank you for doing that.