I knew this NGC submission was taking a long time, but had no idea it had been THIS long!

Update: resolution in Post #19.

Where in the heck is my coin, NGC?

Hmm. Let’s check my submissions summary page.

OK, wow. According to this, they received my order on January 1st, 1970, while I was still a preschooler, and their company wasn’t even founded yet!




A click on the invoice number link provides a bit more accurate information. Received on August 27, 2024. Still a very long time ago. We’re at four and a half months now. And it has been stuck in “Grading/Quality Control” for months now.




Now, I know NGC Ancients has the slowest turnarounds. That’s the nature of the beast. And I also opted for NCS conservation on this piece, to remove some deposits. That adds to the turnaround time, but still- that work is complete- and has been, for a while.

I know this because I got the Photovision images months ago- showing the coin both before and after the conservation.

Before:


After:


Will we hit the five-month mark before I finally get my coin back? Hmm. One wonders…

 

I think fifty-five years is long enough to wait, don’t you? I mean, geez!

 

With ancients, which do likely require much more research on their end, the turnarounds can definitely be slower. Same with some of the hammered silver and gold medieval coins I’ve submitted. The more esoteric an item is, the longer it’s likely to take.

According to the previous owner’s research posted in a prior discussion, this coin is also an error: a flipover double strike. Not that I have any great confidence that NGC will note that on the label.

 

Truth be told, I’m in no great rush on this one, and not losing any sleep over it. I mostly posted this thread to point out that amusing “1/1/70” receipt time.

But yeah, after 4-1/2 months, I’m starting to think the cogwheels in their machine need a bit of greasing…

 

I’ll pretend like I understood most of that.

 

True, I can see how the pool of qualified personnel would be pretty limited.

 

Well, nobody was ever able to explain to me why this coin was sitting in limbo for four and a half months, despite having been ready long ago. The only explanation I got was that there was a "shipping hold" on it, though nobody could ever explain why. The best I can figure is that it's because I put my work address on the invoice for shipping, instead of the home address they have on file. But I'm pretty sure I've had stuff shipped from them to my work address before, without encountering this issue.

I spoke with a representative when I was at the NGC table at the FUN show, and he mentioned this hold but did not know why it was put on there. He suggested I call Customer Service, which I did, and that person said the same thing. It had a shipping hold on it, but why they didn't inform me of that and let things dangle in limbo for months without contacting me is anybody's guess. The Customer Service rep did not know why the hold had been put on there, either- nor why I had never been informed of it.

Anyway...

The main thing is that it finally got unstuck two days after I called, and the final news is good. The coin got a Mint State grade, which I did not expect. NGC described the flipover double strike as a "die shift", which seems accurate enough to me. They did give it a "brushed" notation, but that could refer to the conservation work they did themselves.

So yeah, it was a long wait, but now that the coin is on its way back to me, and the results were good, the wait was well worth it.

Here is the now-complete cert page.

And some pics.

Before conservation:


After conservation (deposits removed):



Slab pics from cert page:






Photovision obv-rev pics from cert page: