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Pushing The Postal Envelope
Alexander Burke writes: "The Annals of Improbable Research has a sidesplitting account of their research into exactly what the USPS will tolerate. They mailed various items -- ranging from the absurd to the grotesque, usually without packaging -- to various real domestic addresses. Said items include a hammer, a rose, a ski (!), a tooth, a brick, a helium balloon, a bottle of water, and many more. It's pure craziness, and definitely worth a read!"
Well, my contribution towards the torture of delivery people was aimed at UPS, but it was humorous just the same.
Last summer, I tracked down a fellow from Montana who has some blacksmithing tools I wanted, and sent him a check for a few hundred dollars. A few days later, I woke up to the sound of a UPS truck pulling in my driveway bright and early:
*slam*
*swoosh* (rear door opening)
"goddamn... fuggin..piece o...hrrrrr"
*stompstompstompstomp*
*hwathump* (on my doorstep)
"...can't fuggin believe... fuggin two of 'em... arrrr..."
*stompstompstompstomp*
*hwathump* (again on my doorstep)
By the time I got my jeans on, the truck was pulling away. And there they were: one 140 lb. anvil, and one 150 lb. anvil (nice ones, too), side by side on my doorstep, no packaging of any kind -- just a mailing label taped to the side of each -- right up against the screen door so that I couldn't get out.
Served me right, I suppose.
Jon
I think not...(*poof*)
The thing that jumped out at me was the brick that got pulverized by the DEA. I want to know if those motherfucking jackbooted thugs had a warrant to destroy private property to look for drugs, and if so, what the probably cause was that some idiot judge accepted.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Yeah, they'll mail bricks, but...
Usually they'll mail them only if they don't know they're bricks. I hear there's a specific regulation about it.
It's not to keep you from mailing bricks attached to business-reply cards...
Seems a LONG time back (like before the US highway system was complete - and I mean US, not Interstate) there was a town in the upper half of lower Michigan, which wanted to build a town hall. Out of bricks.
There were no paved roads nearby, and no brick makers either.
So they bought some bricks down in Detroit and looked into what it would cost to ship them commercially. Then they checked how much it would cost to mail them first-class. First class rates are standard, with the easy-to-deliver metro mail subsidizing the hard-to-deliver cross-country and back-country stuff.
Turned out it was MUCH cheaper to wrap each brick and send it first class than to ship them.
So they did.
And the post office delivered every last one of 'em. At considerable impact to their budget.
And then the regulations were changed - before somebody decided to build a hotel or something. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Using odd languages. Some of my relatives decided to play this game a long time ago. One of the best to get through was a envelope that was entirely addressed in Tolkein's runes- address, return address and letter inside. The USPS managed to decode and deliver the letter in less than a week.
It's possible, though, that the USPS in AK has a higher tolerance because of the lack of other options for moving stuff around in Alaska. A buddy of mine said that his grandfather once wanted a Christmas tree where he lived in Kodiak (an island off the southern coast of AK) so he came to Anchorage, bought one, dragged it into the post office, and mailed it. No extra packaging, no problem.
MyopicProwls
MyopicProwls
My homepage
Give 'em a bit of respect, or at least think about what they have to put up with on those days when you want to shoot someone because of the quality of service you receive.
I never quite understood the complaints people had about the USPS; you put something in the mail, in a few days it's delivered. What more do you want? I guess people assume that because it's the government, it can't be efficient, despite receiving proof that it's a pretty well-run system every day in their mailbox. Of course, a scary amount of people in this country believe angels involve themselves in their daily lives, and witches exist, so I guess logic is in short supply...
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I work at UPS, and ALL of the items listed would have made it through as shipped with no problems, except for the fact that they might be a bit roughhoused. It might seem strange to drop a hammer into a mailbox, but at UPS, this is par for the course. There are a LOT of individual items shipped as is, no wrapping, with just a label slapped on the side. Especially around Xmas, people will literally ship Xmas trees with a label taped around the trunk. It usually ends up in several pieces by the time it gets to its destination, but it WILL get there.
Other strange things that have come through the system include an unwrapped matress, a freshly severed bear's head, LOTS of tires with no wrapping, a car bumper that looked like it had been ripped off the car, complete with the license plate, boxes of live crickets which usually break open so you have crickets loose all over the place, individual car parts with no wrapping. Rank food is quite common on return items.
Fortunately, at UPS about 3% of the volume involves packages like this, so there are regular methods to transport them internally (they don't travel on the conveyor belts) I would imagine that the post office simply doesn't have the facilities to deal with a large number of unusual objects.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I would advise you, though, not to put the postal employees through too much grief. Their job is tough enough as it is. When you want to send some critical and strangely sized package, just do us all a favor and use FedEx or UPS or one of the many other private carriers. And pack appropriately! The poor guy who had to figure out what to do with the moldy and stinky cheese deserves a medal. The person who was forced to break the brick into little pieces to check for drug content probably had better things to do. And the person who had to lug the snow ski to a mailbox probably does not get enough medical coverage by the USPS to make up for the dent in his back.
These are people, people! Give 'em a bit of respect, or at least think about what they have to put up with on those days when you want to shoot someone because of the quality of service you receive.
"Please be advised that human remains may not be transported through the mail."
So THAT's what happened to aunt June...
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