Anyway, I'd like to thank my reader SMOD for sending me this. He was trying to ship a package to a friend and was using the U.S. Postal Service website to figure out the cost. It had some, uh, surprising questions.
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Shipping
Anyway, I'd like to thank my reader SMOD for sending me this. He was trying to ship a package to a friend and was using the U.S. Postal Service website to figure out the cost. It had some, uh, surprising questions.
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15 comments:
Central Kentucky member of the tribe here. Very glad you are doing well, and update when you can--we will be waiting. Hope everyone else is holding up too.
First, glad to see a sign of life.
Second, yes, the US Postal service ships almost anything. I had baby chicks shipped to me for a jr. High science project.
And before anyone asks, the chicks grew up to be lovely hens (no roosters) that were household pets until they died.
The USPS just rolled out a new shipping program for cremations last fall. Special shipping packaging and 4 color glossy telling you all about the new program. They even followed up with a phone call to make sure we got our information. I kinda doubt if your office was on their target market list.
One could get a real well-rounded education from studying how to mail something with the USPS.
"Disneyland may be closed right now, but I'm not going to let that stop me from dumping Grandma's ashes into the Haunted Mansion."
Beekeepers get packages of 3-5 pounds of live bees through the mail. I wonder if those count as live animals or hazardous materials?
Glad to see you're back and (hopefully) doing okay!
But where do I click to find out about mailing cremated day old poultry?
Which explains why there's such a thriving black market for fake IDs for poultry.
Every week the company my husband works for receives a shipment of black widow spiders they use to make the antivenom. :-)
I have live aquarium fish mailed to me by USPS all the time and I have to say, it's pretty cool that they always make it alive and well. Haven't shipped any day-old poultry, though, but my mail lady told me she delivers baby chicks by mail all the time.
Now I feel like a weirdo. I have had every one of those things shipped to me. MIL's remains, baby chicks, a baby tortoise and butane.
I'm a mail carrier...believe me, it's most interesting at our small office when the bees arrive, and half of them are on the OUTSIDE of the container. Since I raised bees at one time years ago, I always got the job of dealing with that...
It used to be legal to ship dead game that had been hunted, provided an address tag was attached. And, before a loophole was closed, it was possible to send people via U.S. mail provided proper postage was included. Since it was cheaper than a train ticket, a few people used the loophole to send their kids to visit their grandparents. These incidents attracted press attention and the loophole was closed.
Mice....
If I recall, there was a limit of maybe 50 or a hundred per box.
Having had to ship a bunch of small items recently, I can say that the click 'n ship feature is very handy. Just watch out for the attempts to sign you up for the daily surveillance reports of what's coming to your mailbox (it won't stop them, but at least you won't waste your time), or the credit card wallet services, etc etc.
This is a fun experiment that tested what the USPS will deliver: https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i4/TMP-1110023375.htm
"Having long been genuine admirers of the United States Postal Service (USPS), which gives amazingly reliable service especially compared with many other countries, our team of investigators decided to test the delivery limits of this immense system. We knew that an item, say, a saucepan, normally would be in a package because of USPS concerns of entanglement in their automated machinery. But what if the item were not wrapped? How patient are postal employees? How honest? How sentimental? In short, how eccentric a behavior on the part of the sender would still result in successful mail delivery?"
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