There seem to be some odd wormholes in the USPS. When I get an inbound international parcel, there seems to be a 1-in-3 chance that it will ping-pong back and forth between international arrival at JFK and an unrelated distribution center in New York before it ends up being sent to my regional distribution center and then to me. This doesn’t seem to be related to origin country, size of parcel, or insurance - it seems to be a random distribution.
Outbound is even stranger - earlier this year I sent two parcels to Germany as 2 line items on one shipment. They were both picked up by the same carrier at the same time. The second one appeared in tracking within the next few days as on its way to Germany. The first one disappeared for nearly 2 weeks before it surfaced in Japan of all places. Fortunately, the UPU signatory nations have a duty of moving the package toward its destination at no extra charge (the origin country collects and apparently keeps all of the fees), so it got to Germany by the 3rd week.
The AIR journal did a series of postal experiments back in the spring of 2000 and were quite surprised to see the success rate of various strange items, oddly packaged, with either insufficient or excessive postage attached, and with various forms of insufficient recipient address. From this, AIR determined that “Second, the delivery involved the collusion of sequences of postal workers, not simply lone operatives. The USPS appears to have some collective sense of humor, and might in fact here be displaying the rudiments of organic bureaucratic intelligence.”
On other occasions, that USPS bureaucratic intelligence is nowhere to be seen. I had ordered some high-value Cisco components on eBay and the seller sent them insured, with delivery confirmation, etc. The last tracking update was:
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| Expected Delivery Day: Saturday, January 3, 2015 |
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| Date & Time | Status of Item | Location |
| January 1, 2015 , 12:33 am | Departed USPS Facility | ALLEN PARK, MI 48101 |
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For a over a week, neither the shipper nor I could get any kind of reasonable answer as to what was holding the shipment up. Finally, someone from USPS contacted the shipper and told them that the 53’ trailer had been loaded in Allen Park and towed by a parking lot tug to the outbound staging area for its next destination. Then everybody went home as it had just turned to New Year’s Day a half hour before this trailer move was made.
Subsequent to this, there were a number of shifts not working due to the holidays. So nobody bothered to keep track of the trailer all the mail & parcels were on. Once the mail trucker contractors were checked, nobody claimed to have hitched it and brought it to the next destination. Someone did remember a burnt area of the parking lot where the outbound trailers were staged for pickup.
Upon conferring with the Fire Department (who came out an extinguished it around 3 AM on New Year’s Day), there was nobody around to report this to, so they just made sure the fire was out, packed up, and went back to the fire station houses.
It wasn’t until that USPS facility got a lot of calls from people in the same situation as my shipper, that they actually began investigating what had happened. About a week later, the shipper got a very low-key payment of the insurance claim for the 2 Cisco items I had on that truck. When they asked about all the mail other people had on that truck which was also burned, they were told that unless it was scanned for insurance / registered mail purposes, they didn’t know what mail was lost in the trailer and people would need to contact them to file claims.
And the USPS tracking for my item still says I should have by January 3rd, 2015. I would have expected the tracking to go “stale” and not show up in the system any more, but apparently it never times out.