Am I the only one who is continuously amazed at the way shipping takes place in the modern world? I ordered a 22″ monitor, and it is coming here through UPS, and I have the handy tracking code which tells me where my package is and when it will get here and how long it took, etc.
That in and of itself is pretty damned amazing. But the fact that they can ship that many packages, get them where they are supposed to be, and do so with relatively little incident simply boggles my mind. It really is amazing.
Dave Ruddell
If only the same technology could somehow be applied to airline luggage.
Jon H
I get an antidepressant from an online pharmacy. A week after my order, I get a little package from Vanuatu, which I always find amusing.
John B.
John,
You’ve GOT to seek out the New Yorker article about UPS from several issues ago. If you’re amazed by the little factoids in your post, you’d better be sitting down when you read the article. Incredible.
Mason
For all the jokes about the USPS, every time I think about the setup, I’m amazed. Millions and millions of letters delivered within days of being mailed.
ppgaz
You guys remind me of my grandmother.
She’d stand and watch six lanes of traffic whizzing by, and wonder: “Where do all these cars go?”
Fledemaus
and do so with relatively little incident
You realize, of course, that this statement virtually guarantees that your monitor is going to get lost, right?
Jay
If you were to see the other side of their business (logistics and billing), you’d wonder how they even survive.
These companies can deliver packages, but their finances are a freaking mess because they don’t know what they’ve been paid or what hasn’t been paid.
Shawn
It is amazing and sometimes amazingly non-sensical. I ordered something awhile back, to be shipped to New Mexico. I tracked it. They sent it from Kansas to New Jersey, then back to NM. Didn’t make much sense, but it was delivered pretty quickly.
Non-Fat Latte Liberal
I agree. Maybe it’s getting older that makes you notice these things, but when I moved to DC 6 months ago, I wanted a DC area code for my cell phone; called up, asked they gave me a new number and told it would be working within an hour. Out of curiousity I tried it 10 min later, the new number worked.
It’s easy to get upset when this stuff doesn’t work out but the percentage of the time that it DOES work out is miraculous.
John Cole
Yeah- if you really want your mind to boggle, consider the fact that for the war in Iraq, we were able to move a city half way around the world, complete with a shitload of weapons, and fight a war.
How Hannibal and Alexander the Great and those guys did it is simply beyond me. Half the time I go anywhere I forget my cell phone and toothbrush.
bago
Consider Burning Man.
For a week it’s the third largest city in Nevada, filled with all sorts of cool things like tesla coils and 3 story rotating glass spheres and an airport, when 2 weeks prior it was nothing but lake bed.
It even comes with a Thunderdome!
Mike Jones
My personal nominee for continual amazement is the NYC subway system. It Just Works, to the point where most people take it for granted. All day, every day, 24 hours a day. Amazing.
Mr Furious
Tracking packages online is always fun. Working as a freelancer (in MI, for clients in NYC) has really given me an appreciation for the wonders of overnight shipping. You know what time it arrived where, which truck it’s on, who signed for it…incredible.
Ah, but for me FedEx has gone the way of the dodo now. Cable modems and FTPs have rendered physical packages obsolete. 250MB folders transfer to my home computer or back to NY (or a printer in KY, etc) in mere minutes.
It is an amazing time. Makes me want to do the “My Favorite Inventions” post I toy with from time to time.
Garth
Wired Magazine had an interesting article about UPS sometime last millennium:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.09/ups.html
sidereal
My Netflix subscription is reaching the point where my DVDs are going to start arriving before they send them out, which is probably going to cause some kind of temporal black hole that destroys the Earth. So, sorry in advance.
Far North
I live in a town that our state’s biggest newspaper calls the city on the edge of nowhere. It truly is the last stop in commercial jet travel. I just got a part from Sears via UPS in 36 hours. It’s always been truly amazing
Jeff
sidereal beat me to the punch. I’m amazed at how fast and efficiently Netflix operates (unless he was being sarcastic and it went over my head).
metalgrid
If only the same technology could somehow be applied to airline luggage.
UPS and other delivery systems aren’t dependent on our tax dollars propping them up like the airline industry is. One of them is close to free market capitalism and the other is closer to crony-capitalism. Guess which is which.
Barry
About Netflix – I live in MI, and I recently noticed that Netflix deliveries were taking a day less (from ~3 to ~2), and saw that the return address was now in MI. Then I thought about how little it would take to run a Netflix ‘branch’: the DVD’s, which frequently could be burned as needed, a printer for the labels and envelopes, a computer to run things and to burn the DVS’, and a big basket to take to the post office.
You could run it out of the trunk of a car, in good weather.
And Sidreal, don’t worry – I’ve been getting my neighbor’s Netflix rentals, along with mine. So he’s losing at least one day per disk, which should preserve the temporal balance.
CadillaqJaq
The previous posts are amazing! It’s a great time.
I’m old enough to recall when our rural mailman (also in MI) would accept payment of 3-cents attached to an envelope with a spring-loaded clothes-pin and if the recipient lived farther down his mail route, would cancel the 3-cent stamp (that he furnished) with an indelible pencil and deliver same day. (OK, you may chuckle now… it happened.)
jeff
I heard that the Fedex idea was a class assignment in business school, and the teacher said it would never work and the future founder (whatever his name is) got a ‘c’ grade for the work. Nice ‘c,’ eh? Incidentally, the way these services do things overnight is airport hubs, so something to downtown Atlanta from the suburbs would very likely fly to Memphis, then to Atlanta to be delivered. The only other way to divide local and long-distance deliveries would simply take too long. Amazing indeed…
The Phnom Penh
It is one of the things I’m thankful for when I’m in the developed world. Here in Phnom Penh, a favorite activity among expats is trying to figure out how mail actually gets to one’s house. When it makes it, that is – I’ve been waiting for some things for more than a year. No one has ever seen a letter carrier here. When I want to send something important, I take it to Bangkok. And when I got my new Mac, I had it shipped to a friend in Oregon, who then hand-carried it to me. You should be thankful for UPS.