A question regarding my post:
FedEx tracking shows that my book was handed off to the local post office for delivery. The Post Office says they have no record of it. So assuming malfeasance, and not a handling error, where would the theft have occurred? A Postal employee receives the box from FedEx, thinks, ‘Hey, this is coming from a book seller! I don’t know what it is, but I want it!’, and does not enter it into the USPS tracking system?
Maybe the book never got instantiated.
During high school and my first years of college, I got part time work at a small postal sorting facility in West Los Angeles filling in when the regular postal people took vacations during the summer and around Christmas time. This was in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While I never witnessed outright theft of mail, I certainly saw people slitting plastic envelopes to check out Playboys and other adult magazines in the days before porn was easily and cheaply acquired. Some of those magazines may never have made it to their final destinations.
One of the other temps when I was there was arrested when he was caught printing himself out hundreds of express mail postage stamps that I assume he planned to resell, but that was the only major incident I remember.
Nice!