I once got one of those puffy envelopes in the mail. Inside was a torn piece of cardboard with a mailing label addressed to me, and a letter from the post office apologizing for a shipping accident and a contact inquiring about my “damaged” shipment.
The problem was I hadn’t ordered anything I could remember. And nobody I could think of who conceivably would have sent me a package said they did either. There was nothing identifying on the scrap I received other than my name on a printed label.
I never did figure out it was I didn’t get. My best guess is that it was a long forgotten “free gift with subscription” or something. I always thought that if only there had been a partial sender tag with a last name and an broken ddress in Prague or something it would have been my best change to be the protagonist in an “Innocent Everyman dragged into cold war spy novel” story. But no such luck :(.
Several years ago, my son worked two jobs. One at UPS and one at a local flight school. This school had a motley collection of old Cessnas, one of which was painted the odd brown color of UPS trucks.
As Christmas approached, he got behind schedule and ended up grabbing an available plane from the school to fly his GF’s present to her (at Baylor 90 miles away). He’d just finished delivering packages all day at UPS. Still in his UPS uniform, he landed, taxied his brown plane to the Baylor terminal and sprinted thru the waiting area carrying a box. He heard one of the waiting passengers say to another: “I thought their planes were a lot bigger.”
In college I worked in a neurophysiology lab. We got some pretty strange shipments, including live nudibranchs. One day the delivery guy needed a signature for a box that had all sorts of warning stickers on it. He was curious, so he stuck around while I opened it.
Inside the first box was a slightly smaller box, and inside that box was nested a still slightly smaller box. Each box was taped securely shut and covered with warnings. Eventually I got to a sealed tyveck envelope. Inside the envelope was a tin can. I retrieved the can opener we kept handy for just this use.
Inside the can was a vial of tetrodotoxin, which we used to affect certain cell membrane channels. When I explained to the delivery dude how deadly it was (and I exaggerated just to mess with him) he was bug-eyed freaked out. From then on he treated each of our deliveries as if they contained unstable explosives.
A couple of months ago, some friends and I went to Phoenix to see Tool in concert. Since we’d be flying, there was the possibility that any controlled substances we wanted to take along (which turned out to be legal in Arizona anyway) would get confiscated at the airport.
So, one friend came up with the idea that I should send a package to our hotel room. He had a vacuum sealer, and sealed the controlled substance in an airtight pouch. He then put it in a sampler tea box with a bunch of teabags. He told me not to use my return address. He always used “Phil Lesh.”
So, I took the package to the post office and used the automatic kiosk to print out the postage stamp and get a receipt with the tracking number. For the return address, I wrote down “John Edwards” and the address of the NC capital in Raleigh. You remember John Kerry’s running mate who got in all those scandals? Yes, our former esteemed senator.
When we got to our hotel, I checked the lobby to see if any package had come in. Damn, I forgot to bring along the tracking number. I checked every day we were there, and no package.
After I got back home, I found the tracking number and keyed it into USPS’s web site. The package first went to New Jersey for some reason, then came back to NC. Somebody at the capitol building signed for it.
I ask as a guy who keeps marine aquariums. There are nudibranchs, pronounced “nudibranks” because some damn foreigner could not speak American, that are specialized. One, for example, eats only aiptasia, a salt water aquarium pest. Others eat certain coral that we wish to keep alive. :dubious:
A guy at Riddle’s Elephant Sanctuary said that their foot is so large, that if they step on your foot, you ain’t going anywhere, but it does break anything, nor hurt.
Hermissenda crassicornis. They are normally positively phototactic. I would “teach” them to avoid light by pairing light with a negative stimulus. Then I would dissect out their brains and record from photoreceptors cells, comparing results with data obtained from control animals. We were looking at cellular changes in learning.
There were work study students who maintained the aquaria and noted any problems with individuals. Every few days they were each fed a piece of raw mussel, which they gradually consumed. They had excellent care right up to the moment I cut their heads off.
The first one happened a couple decades ago, when I first moved to South Florida from Ohio. My stepmom was not terribly experienced at shipping things, so even since then, I’ve received a lot of weird broken pieces of things that were meant as gifts. That first year though, she made some candy buckeyes (peanut butter balls dipped in chocolate) and wrapped them in wax paper and stuck them in an old checkbook box. What she didn’t realize was: it was probably about 85 degrees in December in South Florida. And the post office guy would just drop the box on our front porch. So I get home from work around 5, 5:30 and my roommates inform me that I’ve received a package. I open the box and start pulling wrapped gifts out. And then something bit me on my hand. And then a couple other somethings bit me on my hand. Upon further inspection, I discovered that fire ants had zeroed in on the choco/pb treats and because nothing was airtight, they’d infested the box and were happily devouring my candy buckeyes. I squawked a bit and ran outside to finish opening the box out in the front yard, shaking and picking ants off things as I went through it. I finally got to the checkbook box, now full of ants and very melty candy buckeyes and threw it straight in the trash. My stepmom’s packing and shipping skills never improved, although they stopped mailing me perishables.
Recently, I was on Target’s website and noticed some microplush blankets on sale for $10, so I ordered two. To get free shipping, I tossed in one bottle of nail polish. What I didn’t notice and paid no attention to was that Target’s website saves the last address you ship to and makes it your default shipping address unless you pay attention and change it. The last shipment I’d made was to my mom. Fast forward about a week and Mom calls me and wants to know did I send her some blankets? And nail polish? WTF? I realized immediately what had happened and knew it would be difficult for my mom (frail health) to take the box to the post office and then pay for shipping to send me the cheap-ass blankets I’d gotten free shipping on. Oh what the hell, mom, enjoy your new blankets. I ordered another pair, and the nail polish, again, for myself.
Not too funny of a package delivery story, but here it is:
FedEx has an option called “First Overnight”. It’s for when you want packages delivered earlier than their usual default time of about 10 in the morning.
Twice here at work we’ve had special emergency situations where we wanted our paperwork delivered to the destination by 8 a.m. These were two completely separate projects, separated by a year or two. Both times, we got an e-mail from FedEx that the package could not be delivered because “no one was there to receive delivery”. That was a big lie, by the way; both times there was someone at the office waiting to receive the important papers.
When this scenario happens, FedEx’s procedure is that the package goes back on the truck for another delivery attempt later in the day. That “later in the day” might very well be at 3 p.m., which it was in both of these cases.
Back in March, I ordered a dozen packs of wasabi peanuts and a couple bags of dry cat food from Walmart.com
FedEx brought the peanuts separately, or what was supposed to be the peanuts. Walmart had a “wasabi peanuts” label on the box but it actually contained 8 pounds of dog biscuits. You’d think somebody would have noticed that 4.4 ounces of wasabi peanuts × 12 != a 10 pound box.
We ended up donating the dog treats to the local animal shelter.
