My bad. UPS Air Freight has multiple US hubs. FedEx has an international hub in Indianapolis, though.

Yeah, USPS is cheaper and they're getting pretty fast and reliable. Here in Bubba County, UPS contracts out some of the smaller package delivery to USPS.

The USPS office in Bubbaville Beach is usually crowded. But, there's a contracted post office on the military base I used to work on and still have access to. They don't take credit cards, but there's almost never a line. Actually, the clerk there is lonely and welcomes the company.

USPS got rid on the idiot mail carrier we had in Bubba Estates. That improved things greatly.

A friend is a UPS Captain. He was flying chartered business jets, living hand- to-mouth and got laid off right about the time UPS Air Freight started up. He applied, but didn't think he'd get hired. But, he was in the right place at the right time, and got in. He works three weeks and is off a week. They want him at his airplane almost a day beforehand. So, he flies a passenger flight on Monday, flies a UPS jet on Tuesday, chills on Wednesday, flies a UPS jet on Thursday, and takes a passenger flight home on Friday. His seniority keeps him flying in the daytime, and he doesn't do any international flights. He said over the ocean, there's no "Plan B."

My friend's early days with UPS was rough. He said those two flights in the early morning hours every week would kick his ass. He was always tired and he was aging fast. He really enjoys his daytime only schedule now. He had an eight-figure inheritance ($10M+) about 15 years ago. But, he loves his job so much he's going to work until they boot him out at 65.

His wealthy dad paid for his flying lessons when he was young, and let him work at his company off-and-on around his intermittent flying jobs. He kept working his way up in flying jobs, and having a lot of jet time when UPS started up put him over the top. He said he knows he's lucky, but that he also "prepared for being lucky." There's probably a life lesson there.

He's had one close call, a TCAS incident years ago. He was sweating bullets until the cause was determined and it wasn't him. If he'd been the one who ****ed up, he'd have been out of a job.

When heavy jet cockpits went from three seats to two, a lot of pilots who were second officers (flight engineers) lost any hope of getting into the the right front seat. A lot of jet pilots lost their jobs after 9-11 and never got them back. My friend said he was glad he was flying freighters after 9-11.

It's a miracle that anything gets delivered to the correct address in good working condition. Between the shippers not packing items properly to delivery drivers delivering to the WRONG addresses and/or the packages getting good and abused during transit, the consumer is screwed.

husky man is back and in stride : all negative, all the time and zero grasp on reality .

Always with his hand out of course .

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-Nate
1982 240D 408,XXX miles
Ignorance is the mother of suspicion and fear is the father

I did then what I knew how to do ~ now that I know better I do better

You should stop digging. The efficiency of the the USPS, fed ex, UPS... is quite amazing. Over my life, I have received a hand full of misdelivered parcels. Very few things have been damaged or mishandled.

You continuously make up stories with out any first hand knowledge and it just makes you out to be a fool. Just do us all a favor and STFU unless you have something worthwhile to say.

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Sent from an agnostic abacus

2014 C250 21,XXX my new DD ** 2013 GLK 350 18,000 Wife's new DD**

- With out god, life is everything.
- God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller as time moves on..." Neil DeGrasse Tyson
- You can pray for me, I'll think for you.
- When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

You need to interview companies who ship thousands of packages each day of the week. Ask them about their war stories and then and only then David will you begin to understand their frustrations........

one thing for sure; if you are shipping or having a valuable item shipped to you, you may want to consider having it professionally crated by a professional crating company. Otherwise it may arrive damaged and then what good is it?

Industry standard is small to medium boxes will be pitched up to 20 feet. This goes for all carriers. Pack accordingly.

Stuff going weird places is probably a damaged barcode. When these are identified they are fixed and put back into transit assuming other identifying information is still available. You really want to make sure something gets there, print a second label and put in inside the box. If everything is destroyed on the outside and the parcel ultimately ends up in a lost parcel facility, they will open the box and try to identify ownership by contents compared to claims put in.

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I thought this was a matter of course thing, putting the address inside the package .

__________________
-Nate
1982 240D 408,XXX miles
Ignorance is the mother of suspicion and fear is the father

I did then what I knew how to do ~ now that I know better I do better

7I don't know how many heavy jet pilots FedEx or any commercial air carrier has in the cockpit, but I'd venture it's damn few 20 somethings. The golden age of putting both sexes, (esp. women) of very inexperienced 20 something pilots in these heavy cockpits was in the late 1980s. We're very fortunate there weren't many if any situations where these inexperienced were in command of the craft.

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'06 E320 CDI
'17 Corvette Stingray Vert

One of my indulgences lately is watching "Air Disasters" on the Smithsonian Channel. The best combination is young planes and old pilots. The air freight business has a lot of the opposite. But, even the gray-hairs sometime **** up. My favorite episodes of Air Disasters are the ones with the plot "... flirting with a flight attendant, and forgot to set the flaps for take-off."

A knucklehead friend of mine got into the Navy pilot pipeline, but failed the eye test. He got moved to the backseat (Naval Flight Officer candidate) but quit during training. They were up in a thunder storm at night, and he said "**** this ****." They then made him an air intelligence officer. A lot of NFO's end up as commercial pilots, getting flight training on their own after getting out of the Navy. The skies are a safer place because my friend was not one of them.

I was a bank courier in college. One of my jobs was meeting small aircraft at airports. Banks would exchange paper checks using small aircraft at night. They'd get their money a few days faster than routing the checks through the Federal Reserve system. One plane I met only got a stack of checks about two inches high. But, a few days interest on those checks more than paid for the trip from Norfolk to Charlotte.

Check routing provided a lot of entry-level pilot jobs back in the day. The pilots got a lot of yoke and pedal time since there was usually just one pilot onboard, and night-flying honed their skills really fast. But, that whole industry was wiped out, literally overnight, by Check21, the electronic check routing system.

Either that or mayhap folks are too trusting .

Of course, I go out and drive daily so I do understand your concern over morons.

__________________
-Nate
1982 240D 408,XXX miles
Ignorance is the mother of suspicion and fear is the father

I did then what I knew how to do ~ now that I know better I do better

The delivery problem of making many stops at different locations during a day, and doing it with the cheapest cost, is a math problem known as "The Traveling Salesman" equation.

So far no one has figured out how to solve it since it changes every few minutes.