So close and yet so far ...

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Originally Posted by doug3030

My girlfriend's mother posted a letter to her when we were living in Darwin a few years ago. It took nine months for the letter to go from country Victoria to Darwin. There was no rubber stamp on it but it looked like it had been a coaster under someone's coffee mug for quite a while from all the rings on it.:rolleyes:

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Stuff happens I guess. I was clearing a mail box one night and one thing we did was put an empty mail bag in the bottom of the box, this did two things, if it rained then it kept the mail above the water if the box leaked and if you ran out of bags because the mail was heavy you could grab one out of the box. I had been looking at one box for a while and thought the bag needed to be changed as it was a bit grotty so I dragged it out and somehow an express envelope had become hidden in the folds of the the bag it and was some years old, it was a job application and I always wondered how the person got on. I took it back to the mail centre and let them deal with it. We were all talking about after work and no one could even conceive how it might have happened but it had. It was quite common when part timers were working in the system such as Christmas time to find that bags had not been emptied properly and this was caused because they had never been shown the correct method to ensure it was empty.

As part of its world tour it could always arrive in Sydney, :)




Nova Scotia, Canada. :((:oo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney,_Nova_Scotia

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Originally Posted by Handyjack

As part of its world tour it could always arrive in Sydney......

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Could be another short stay in Sydney.

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Originally Posted by Christos

Could be another short stay in Sydney.

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No, it will be like Halley's Comet, it wont be that close again in your lifetime. :oo:

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Originally Posted by doug3030

What's the chances that the Greek Postal Service will not be able to find the address locally and send it back to the good ole USA? :2tsup:

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That is a terrifying thought.

But then having seen what some of the management at our local post office has done . . . .

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Originally Posted by joe greiner

A co-worker once received a letter, about 10 years past its postmark, with an imprint stating, "Found in equipment thought to be empty." Apparently, this happens often enough to justify making a rubber stamp.

Cheers,
Joe

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I had a small padded post satchel posted from the USA receive that sort of treatment. I received it approx. 11 weeks after it was posted and in a pretty sorry state even when the postal staff "repaired" the padded satchel. Fortunately the address label was still readable so it eventually found its destination. The contents, some sew-on patch style badges and hat pins, weren't so lucky and were write-offs.

Gavin

US to Oz in five days: Not bad. Although the US residents bemoan their USPS, my observations are that their tracking service is vastly superior to ours: More informative and more prompt. Maybe theGreeks thought it was a care package and now your parcel is propping up their economy. Was it a highly anticipated parcel?

Regards
Paul

I had a thought. Is it possible that you were given the wrong tracking number? The "out for delivery" part is one of those things that even with the language difference doesn't make sense.

Closure.
Well I arrived home after being away for 10 days (on the Variety Bash to Alice Springs!).
And my package had arrived. I'm none the wiser where it travelled in the meantime.
The only tracking update was that it had been delivered.
Happy that it arrived, stumped as to where it went.

Shame that it cannot talk

A lot of people here would know I worked for AP in a variety of positions starting at driving and eventually ending up managing a freight dispatch dock in Sydney where interstate sub contractors were loaded. I had left AP by the time the following occurred.

My son ordered a large and expensive Lego set and it duly arrived in Sydney then disappeared off the tracking system then re-appeared in a place it had no right to be. DHL had brought it in and handed the parcel off to AP and in the process something had gone wrong. I finally rang AP and had a fairly robust conversation with the young lady who must have the worst job in the world and she gave me the AP line that because the addressing was wrong or something similar they had sent it back to Europe. After I explained that what she was saying was a load rubbish I threatened to start making phone calls to people high in the food chain of AP and hung up. I only knew of one or two people I might lean on and I doubted they could help so it was an empty threat on my part anyway. Next day lo & behold the parcel appeared at our front door! A very quick trip back from Europe I must say.

There's only one thing I dread - expecting a valuable shipment, and then seeing an AP truck on the news - upside down and on fire, somewhere along the Nullarbor. Or seeing a Pacific National major derailment that's carrying parcels for Fastway.

I guess I've been lucky, I've shipped hundreds of items by mail, and ordered and received thousands of items by mail, over more than 50 years - and I've only ever lost two things.
One was a new digital camera (in the early 2000's), ordered off an eBay seller in California. It never arrived, I lodged a complaint, USPS paid out, and I got my money returned. I suspect it was stolen in the mail.
The second item was a workshop manual I sent to a bloke in Mid-West USA. It simply disappeared somewhere in the U.S. postal system. I just refunded the bloke his money, it wasn't a sizeable sum anyway.

The worst episode was buying and shipping a very expensive ($200 here) big old Canon printer cartridge from the U.S. (which I acquired for around $30 from memory, which delighted me no end).
The delight turned to dismay upon opening the parcel - only to find some diligent Customs operator had sliced the cartridge open - obviously expecting to find white powder.

Of course, he/she found only very fine black powder - lots and lots of it - which went everywhere upon opening the box! I didn't know who to abuse, so I just complained to the seller, who refunded my $30.
It was one of the biggest disappointments of all my mailing exercises, and I don't understand how a Customs operator could be such a dill.

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Originally Posted by onetrack

The delight turned to dismay upon opening the parcel - only to find some diligent Customs operator had sliced the cartridge open - obviously expecting to find white powder.

Of course, he/she found only very fine black powder - lots and lots of it - which went everywhere upon opening the box! I didn't know who to abuse, so I just complained to the seller, who refunded my $30.
It was one of the biggest disappointments of all my mailing exercises, and I don't understand how a Customs operator could be such a dill.

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In the early 1970s I was working for a company (North Electric) that through no fault of their own became part of Sprint. Their office was in Delaware, Ohio (Actually Lewis Center) and we were doing the Americanized version of the L M Erichson telephony switching system. It was intended to compete with the Western Electric switching systems. Actually the system was quite successful. It was known as an ETS4. I don't remember exactly but I think that we sold a system or two to Telstra.

In those days international communications was usually done by Telex at 110 baud. (110 bits per second) We were trying to get software upgrades from L M Erichson via magnetic tape from Stockholm. After receiving 5 or 6 tapes that couldn't be read by our IBM system, one of our IT people looked at the tape. It was discovered that the tape had all kinds of fingerprints on it. We figured that customs inspection thought that we were trying to smuggle the latest Swedish **p**o**r**n** (darn nanny filter) into the US. Our solution was to put a second beetle (i.e. BTL or Begining Tape Level ) reflective strip on the tape about 50 or 60 feet down the tape. Then write the software source on the tape after the second beetle. We would mount the tape from Sweden and manually advance the tape a few inches past the beetle and tell the tape drive to go to beetle. At the second beetle we could read the data.

Actually hysterical when you think about it.

If any of you were in IT at that time, you will recognize the ultimate stupidity of all time. A paper tape reader that could read paper tape at 1000 characters or frames per second. That in itself is one of those "Nobody could be that stupid" but the 1000 CPS reader could not read pre-oiled paper tape and IIRC cost about double what a magnetic tape reader cost.

BTW - I am very happy being the IT manager for the two computer network at the house. LOL
No longer having to put up with unreasonable users but only SWMBO. It is funny, when we got the first IBM PC, SWMBO said "I will never use that PC." Yeah, right. Now she can't live without her smart phone and tablet. More LOL.

All goods happen to those who wait patiently...

I just had a 1kg parcel take 4weeks from Florida to me with USPS and of course the ever unreliable Australia Post....

Hi Pete are you going to tell us what you had in the parcel
colbra:)