So what is the thing?
Clearly they are in cahoots with Walmart: 57 cash registers; 2 cashiers.*
*Only one of them trained and the other one suffering either from senility or adolescent hormone ADD.
I worked for a company that made micro precision medical parts. One titanium item was about 6" long and tapered to a point. It needed a .030" hole the length of it. (That’s like 10 hairs in diameter.) The industry term for long holes in relationships to diameter is gun drilling.
The only place we found that could reliability and accurately do this step was in Germany. We routinely sent parts to and fro over the Atlantic. Photocopied the customs forms, no big deal. When 9/11 happed, holy shit. We had a quarter million dollars worth of parts quarantined by customs because the word “gun” was on the paperwork.
I spent hours on the phone saying look dude open one of the freaking boxes. These are titanium biopsy probes the size of your finger. Not anything scary. The bureaucracy was intractable. Took months to get sorted out.
One pissed off customer on the other end. Henceforth all paperwork said “deep hole drilling.”
That’s just one story as a purchasing agent. I banged my head on the desk tracking more oddball shipments than I care to think about.
There once was a shipping container to be unloaded in Baltimore and trucked to us in the Northeast. It wound up on a train in Oklahoma…
one time just because I was curious I mailed a note to my self with my name and address for sending and receiving it took 7 days to get back to me …it had 3 different post marks on it and went 90 miles out of the way
a question I have is amazon sends me my xbox game by ups to la then it switches to usps to get to me …why?
Because UPS outsources to USPS because they are already legally required to daily deliver mail so why not take on some extra workload for some cash as long as the first class letter business is in decline.
That’s the cheapest UPS option. UPS sorts packages at a lower cost, and the USPS delivers them at a lower cost, so this combination is cheaper than just using one (but it’s also slower).
Since this got revived, an update:
I filed a ‘missing mail / tracking’ request with USPS on Sept 27th. I haven’t heard from them since, despite their website stating I will receive updates. The original tracking # still shows it in KY since Sept 16th.
On Oct 12th the company stated that they would ship me another one “ASAP” but that I probably wouldn’t have it in time for this past weekend’s event. When I inquired about shipping status yesterday I received the following reply, “We’ve had some major issues with our shipping partner (which is most likely also the reason why the first package never arrived ) and didn’t want to risk that any more shipments get lost.
But the problems seem to be resolved now and we will continue with the next shipments next week.”
However, their shipping partner is not USPS, but a European shipper who hands it off to USPS. Hmmm, I’m wondering if they were using poor quality shipping labels that would fall off???
I’d love to read that story! Could you give me the title and author?
That’s basically the whole story. It’s in one of those super-short story collections. Each story is only a page or two.
Bump: Guess what finally showed up at my door? The original package, after almost two months!
The original label had:
<Name>
<Street>
<Town>
United States
No State or Zip, but…it’s not “Springfield”, it’s the only town with that name in the country. 10 seconds (& I’m being generous) with Google gives one the state & zip code. No ring of the doorbell, no explanation, no follow email despite the lost package tracking page stating they’d do such.
They may not be super fast at it, but the USPS does take some pride at being able to figure out damaged, incomplete, or even intentionally screwball addresses and get the mail delivered.
Eventually. <g> But they are at least better than Amazon’s own delivery service who have trouble reading half-inch high numbers on a clean and unwrinkled label to get packages to my house.
Well, that delivery problem is the result of the shippers’ poor (incomplete) addressing. I hope you told them about it.
And the USPO probably took less than 10 seconds to get the full address – they may not even have had to use Google. It just took a couple of months for them to get through the hundreds of other badly-addressed packages that were ahead of yours in the dead-letter line. Many of them probably took a lot longer to figure out.
Found it! Chap Foley Rider, Capitalist to the Stars, by Hayford Pierce. I rememebr the stories from Analog magazine in the 1970s. I had trouble finding the book until I searched for the word “Murglepickers”. Earth’s interstellar finances have to go through the First Farmers and Murglepickers Bank of Saggitaterius 
While that story might contain the premise I described, it isn’t the one I was thinking of, which was (as running coach said) a short-short which had no other premise.
The original story was called “Mail Supremacy” by Hayford Peirce.
International shipments tend to fall into that because unlike the US format in which the upper level address fields are: City, National subdivision, Postcode, Country (San Juan PR 00902 USA), wherever they are they may expect to see something more like Postcode, City, Country - with country always being alone in the last line - and they run out of fields.
Heck, it’s a problem even domestically in the US – more than once I am ordering on a site and I enter 123 Streetname Ave Apt ABC, City, State, Zip only to have the system answer back: our USPS database shows there is an Apt ABC, 123 John Q. Streetname Ave, City, State, Zip+4 do you mean that? and I click yes only to then get “cannot process adress as entered” and they wind up with the label reading something like 123 J. Q. Streetname, City, Zip, State
Bump: I got an email overnight:
*Dear Spiderman,
Thank you for using USPS.com.
The US Postal Service® received the search request you submitted and it’s being processed. Your package has not yet been recovered, but every effort is being made to locate your item(s).
Search Request Details:
Request Date: 09/27/2017
Reference: Search ID #123456
Tracking Number: AB123456789CD
We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience.*
:smack:
Oh that’s just so perfect!
I got this overnight: (No, this is not a duplicate of yesterday’s, it’s the day two variant. :rolleyes:)
*Thank you for using USPS.com.
We regret to inform you that after thoroughly searching for your mail we were unable to locate your missing item(s).
Search Request Details:
Request Date: 09/27/2017
Reference: Search ID #123456
Tracking Number: AB123456789CD
We work hard to provide prompt, accurate service to our customers, and regret that we were unable to deliver your mailpiece on this occasion. To help us get your packages to their destination in the future:
Put a return address on the outside of all mailpieces
Include a label with your name and complete address on the inside of packages
We never like to think of anything happening to the mail during transit, but we want to be prepared for any contingency and your assistance is vital to that preparedness.
Once again, we apologize for any inconvenience that you have experienced. We appreciate your business and hope you will give us the opportunity to serve you in the future.
Thank you for using the U.S. Postal Service®.*