I ordered 2 DnD books off eBay and had them ship via FedEx.
Picked up from facility.
Left San Diego CA
Arrived in Memphis TN
Departed Memphis TN
Arrived in Atlanta GA
Departed Atlanta GA
Arrived in Jacksonville FL
Departed Jacksonville FL
Arrived in Atlanta GA
Departed Atlanta GA
Arrived in Memphis TN
Departed Memphis TN
Arrived in Atlanta GA
Departed Atlanta GA
Arrived in Memphis TN
Departed Memphis TN
Arrived in Atlanta GA
Departed Atlanta GA
Arrived in Memphis TN
Departed Memphis TN
Arrived in Atlanta GA
Departed Atlanta GA
Arrive in Jacksonville FL
Departed Jacksonville FL
3 days later, on my doorstep was a mangled box, and thankfully the books were inside. This whole process took over 2 months.
I CAN WIN THIS
day 1: ordered from Tecumseh, Michigan for BC, Canada
day 7: arrived in Michigan for customs
day 9: arrived in Miami
day 24: arrived in BOGOTA, COLUMBIA
nothing more. Crickets. Nada. We’ll wait a week or so and call it Missing, Presumed Dead.
day 37: refunded from vendor (I didn’t want to have him eat it, but he insisted because Bevins is a prince among mere men)
DAY 361: arrived Richmond, BC, Canada
Day 363: arrived at my house
Bevins rejected my offer of paying him back, because, again, the guy’s an absolute prince.
So my package was lost in Colombia for almost a year, and then, magically, re-entered the mail system. I do suspect it actually arrived because, after that moment, it was no longer the job of USPS but in the hands of Columbian mail service for the redirection kick and then Canada for the last-mile.
Yay!
Well BC could mean British Colombia but also Bogota Columbia I guess.
Why did your package start in the northern hemisphere, then get sent to the southern hemisphere, only to be shipped back to the far northern hemisphere?
Shipping logistics aren’t always the most sensical thing. If there’s a large shipment bound for canada leaving colombia, or if that route is known to have better customs times, or if the sorting hub was down so it was forwarded to the next leg of the batch (or it was missorted, or if someone was just entirely too stoned…) those can all result in route planning that on the surface doesn’t make sense.
Read an article years ago where a company used swarm theory to route oil delivery trucks. Drivers were mad because sometimes the route would run them right past a customer, but in the end fuel costs were down 20%.
God I love that shit. Route optimization is one of the most fascinating topics in mathematics because it can look so incredibly bullshit until the final phases.
Can’t find it again, but the original National Geographic article was new science at the time and mind blowing. Love to see how they programmed swarm theory into their application.
Magic
Logistics is an unexplainable science
Fed-Ex lost my insured package, then tried to charge me rent on said package for storage fees in their fucking warehouse. They even sent the bill to a fucking collection agency. The subreddit Fuck Fed-ex was my idea.
FedEx was also second only to UPS in campaign donations prior to the crippling 2006 bill. Fuck Fed-Ex indeed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Accountability_and_Enhancement_Act
Was the package precious?
A birthday present for my daughter. A video game that was @ $60. I re-bought it and sent it USPS a month later.
That’s wonderful! I was making a (probably unfunny) joke because of your username. Hopefully your daughter liked the present!
No, it was a perfect joke, I was just too dense to catch it, derp!
For every anecdotal horror story there are people like me who have lived our whole lives without anything getting lost in the mail. You never hear about that because it’s a non-event. I’ve never mentioned it online until now.
Not sure I can say “never”, but the USPS is rock fucking solid. Tracking might be off a minute, but the package always shows.
I mail a fair amount of stuff for my job and trust me when I say they lose shit all the damn time. Tracking down lost certified mail is such a pain.
Its highly variable, post offices and even plants have a lot more individual autonomy then most would expect. This can create drastically different standards in reality in various locales. To the point where you have some areas a whole day faster than posted timeframes and others two days slower.
Closest I had was a new USPS worker delivered to my next door neighbor. But it was our fault our address was hard to read on the mailbox.
I’ve only had a single package lost by Australia Post and that was ~20 years ago when they were using external contractors for Parcel Post.
The biggest AusPost ‘event’ is your parcel shuffling between Sunshine West, Chullora and Welshpool (all three are fully automated ‘dark’ Distribution centres that have effectively no storage space, so parcels get shuttled between those DC’s as a type of ‘storage in flight’)
Amazon like
Your package will be delivered tomorrow
Tomorrow at 23:59:58 : package left on doorstep as driver sprints away
Only after two days of “package is out for delivery. 11:00-13:00”. JK “13:00-15:00”. JK “17:00-19:00”.
iMile delivery be like:
-
We lost the parcel
-
It’s out for delivery
… 3 days pass
- status changed to Delivered
… 3 days pass
- It’s actually delivered, at 1:30am.
-
Had a package arrive a day early, while it still said it was en route. Was a surprise
The USPS usually delivers shit a day or three before they said they would. Not complaining!
Means your regional distribution hub is rocking their metrics, for every one of those there is another a day or two behind on metrics somewhere else. CA was usually awful for me and east coast was usually fast when shipping things.
DHL staring you dead in the eyes saying “Your package? Sir, this is a Wendy’s. We don’t deliver packages.”
My favorite is when UPS/FedEx use “weather delay” to…fix, I guess?…being behind, or even ahead, of schedule. Most recently something was tracking 2 days faster than advertised by the vendor and originally predicted by UPS. It showed it arrived in my city and then changed to “weather delay” for two days to conveniently get back on schedule. My city isn’t tiny, but it had been nothing but clear sunny skies for weeks at the time. I guess they have people start raising hell if that happens and just sits for 2 days without an excuse like fake weather.
Ups is as bad now days
When I was working deliveries a few decades ago, this was the normal.
until now, i only knew of one USPS
DPD and SmartPosti do basically the same here.
The statuses are “we haven’t been given the package at all yet”, “oh look it’s already at our sorting center where it appeared magically because the sender didn’t give it to us at all” and “in the parcel locker, come get it already ffs”
The first one, as I understand, means it was either handed to their pick-up courier who created a label, or entered into a parcel locker
I’ve only had USPS fail a few times.
Once they broke a fragile things, which. Understandable. Luckily it wasn’t unreplaceable or anything.
Second was shipping a perishable to a person. That person didn’t upkeep their p.o box! That perishable returned after…an extremely long time. I did not open the box. I did not want to see.
I’ve shipped a lot over the years and been shipped a lot, and I greatly prefer USPS over other options.
I ordered a used book series collection from eBay years ago, about $100. It was a hard to find edition here in the US since it’s a British import. The package went MIA for about 3 weeks until it got an update saying it was at the dead letter facility in Denver, CO. I filed a claim describing the items in the box, then radio silence for over a month. All of a sudden I get a package, its a brand new version of the used book set I ordered. I know it wasn’t the same one because I saw the wear and tear in the eBay listing, this was factory sealed.
