My local depot is the Kingston on Thames depot. Those of you less familiar with such things might logically expect that it would be somewhere in the Kingston area. Unfortunately they've recently moved, which makes life more difficult in two ways:
1) it's not in Kingston any more, it's in Hayes, replacing a 20-minute drive with a 45-minute drive, at minimum;
2) not only is it in Hayes, it's on a small industrial park among many other industrial parks in Hayes, with a signpost naming the park visible only from the direction from which you are less likely to be approaching it (if you're coming from my direction, anyhow). Once you find the right park, the noticeboard shows unit 10 as belonging to someone totally different. And if you think there's a map showing you where unit 10 is relative to anything else, you have to be joking. Not to mention that this park only seems to have units 1, 3, 4, 9, 10 and 12 (or something like that). Eventually you turn into an unmarked road within the park which still doesn't have any numbers or names visible until you peer right into one corner where it says "Amtrak Express Parcels".
I didn't see a sign saying "Beware of the Leopard" but I'm sure it was there somewhere.
Over half an hour of driving round Hayes looking for this, including a couple of phone calls to
drown_not_wave to check Multimap for me.Gah.
Eventually I got there and they found my parcel without too much bitching about a lack of consignment number. I pointed out that I needed to check the contents of the parcel before taking it away since it was temperature-dependent and a day late. My face must show my feelings less than I thought, as they handed me a large kitchen-style knife to cut the tape with. But I didn't want to get blood on the fish....
