My dad sent me a vat of olive oil from the village in Greece recently — by which I mean to say that he shipped it months ago, paying 30 euros to have it stacked on a slow boat from Piraeus by way of a company named after a Greek god.

I had not asked for the olive oil and didn't really want it, either, because the fancy-pants organic Greek olive oil you get here in the United States is just as good or better than whatever they have in the village. But there's a guy who "rents" olive trees from my dad and the remuneration is one vat of the resulting liquid per year. Apparently there is such a thing as a Greek who has had too much olive oil because instead of accepting his due this time, my father sent it my way.

Though the oil had been shipped from Greece in the summer, it only recently arrived in the Chicago area. I learned it was in town when an emailed invoice landed in my inbox with a greasy plop, informing me that I had two weeks to pick up my 15-kilo vat before the company would begin charging me a daily fee of $50.

The company kept European office hours, so I had to wait until the day of my son's adenoidectomy to rush in before our afternoon appointment.

I drove to the middle of the industrial park and found the office door about 30 minutes after they opened.

Inside was the expected decor for any Greek shipping business — pleather sofas and glass-topped tables — and on the wall were the obligatory pictures of Mykonos, an island no longer visited by Greeks.

Americans love to visit Mykonos, mostly because that's the place Kim Kardashian and travel influencers go, but Greeks know better than to spend $600 a night to stay in a hotel teeming with sweaty college students queuing for Instagram sunset selfies. No matter how expensive and overrated Mykonos gets, though, Greeks with shipping offices in an industrial park in Chicago are legally required to have pictures of it on their walls.

Standing at one of the desks, looking a bit worried to see a customer, was a man wearing a jumpsuit with the name "Miguel" stitched on the pocket.

"I'm sorry, but Costas isn't here yet," he told me, and I was not even slightly surprised to learn that a Greek business owner wasn't at work at the advertised opening time. Miguel tried to work the computer at a desk with a "Costas" nameplate but couldn't figure out how to turn it on, so I sat down to scroll my phone and await the arrival of Costas, who it was now clear was on Greek time, which is measured in centuries, not minutes past 9 a.m.

The phone rang and Miguel reluctantly answered, sitting down.

The caller immediately launched into a machine-gun-fast string of Greek. Miguel tried to interrupt, but she continued, pausing only to ask "m'akous?" (Greek for "do you hear me?)

"I'm sorry, I don't speak Greek," he finally broke in, and in answer the woman used the international translation method of speaking in the same language but this time much louder and slower.

Miguel looked at me in fear. I told him how to say "I don't speak Greek" in Greek, but at that point, the woman appeared to have already given up and, as a last-ditch attempt, switched to the most exotic language she could think of: English.

I noticed a bowl of ouzo-flavored candy perched on a desk and wondered how long it had been since that had needed to be refilled.

At this point, I was starting to freak out a little bit.

And just as I was starting to get worried that not only would I miss my son's surgery that afternoon but possibly all of his K-12 education as well, our man Costas arrived, smelling of cigarettes and cologne, a leather jacket on his shoulders and his hair back in a shower-wet ponytail.

"You're here for a little oil?" he asked me in Greek, the smile of the well-rested dancing on his face.

"Yes," I answered, trying to convey with my scowl that I wasn't one of those lackadaisical Greeks who cared naught for regular business hours.

"Great," he said, then asked if I'd paid the tariff fee yet while he typed my name into the computer Miguel had vacated.

Ah yes, the tariff fee, which was more than the cost of shipping the oil itself.

I grumbled that I had, then drove my car around to the loading dock, where a different jumpsuited fellow helped me load the vat into the car. It was allegedly 15 kilos, but I remember well being able to lift my son when he weighed 33 pounds, so maybe tins of oil don't obey the laws of physics.

Either way, I was finally out of there, with enough olive oil to drown all the salads in Mykonos, just in time to make the surgery, though my gas mileage must have been pretty bad on the trip there.

I vowed that day to vote in the next election — if for no other reason than to try to remove any international shippers' excuse for including suspicious tariff fees on invoices.

It was that, I decided, or switch to canola.

It's less of a hassle.

Photo credit: Roberta Sorge at Unsplash