It's just politics, and history, and humans being human. Don't expect everything to be optimal, or even rational - and certainly don't expect everything to be fair.

@BigEd...do you work at my office? You just quoted our corporate memo. LOL

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Cat; the other white meat.

Hee hee!

Corrected for you

The problem is power and money. And that is where I will leave it. As we don’t really want this thread to go and get all political...

Mark

It's finally in Canada!

Item has arrived in Canada and was sent for further processing.
Mississauga, ON

Mississauga is only 2 hours from me. I wonder how long it will take to get here seeing as it took a week to get from Zurich to Mississauga.

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Bill

It must have crossed the Atlantic on a tramp steamer.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

It's HERE. Complete with proof it's been to Switzerland. To bad it didn't include labels for Poland and Germany too.




Unboxing - Auzzie style!




Despite it's rather circuitous route from Sauget, IL to Muskoka, ON., it arrived in good condition. In fact I was expecting the older model with the external power supply, but they sent me the latest item with the internal supply. For $105 US (about half what I'd pay for it in Canada) plus shipping I think it was a bargain and I'm quite pleased. Voltages test out well within spec.




Edit: Okay, apparently it is not the latest model, but is the last model made before Global Specialties was spun off from Interplex Electronics Inc. Strange, even though Global Specialties (CA) appears to be a separate company on the far side of the country from Interplex Electronics (CT), Interplex still owns all the designs, copyrights and trademarks for Global Specialties products. However, according to Global Specialties, they are owned by Cal Test Electronics.

Ain't life grand!

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Bill

All's well that ends well!

I can only imagine someone royally screwed up in a sorting depot somewhere, and got your package in the wrong bucket, and thus headed for the wrong continent. But this is something that should not happen often in a depot that's competently run. I also have no idea why the Poles thought the best way to get it to Canada was via Switzerland, as opposed to simply shoving it back on the plane it arrived on.

There's a scene in the famous "Night Mail" film in which a Scottish sorter (on board the TPO, which has already passed Crewe and thus the northern junctions towards Wales) encounters an unfamiliar post town in an address. After consulting with the foreman, it turns out to be a Welsh town; he hasn't got a pigeonhole for those. It's been mis-sorted at origin, and presumably goes into an "irregulars" pile, to be re-sorted at Glasgow for the return trip the following night.

Back in the days when most domestic mail in the USA was transported by train, the sort of mix-up in "Night Mail" happened more often than the Post Office was willing to admit. Sometimes it was a simple error of one of the clerks in the RPO (railway post office) car tossing out a mail sack at the wrong station.

There was an incident that occurred many years ago when a clerk tasked with chucking mail out of an RPO as the train barreled through whistle-stop stations lost track of which towns they had passed and ended up being off by one town. Something like 20 postmasters filed complaints about receiving incorrect mail. History doesn't record if the clerk got fired for his errors.

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

It's worth recalling, also, that "Night Mail" was filmed well before the introduction of postcodes. The post-town (sometimes supplemented by a county) was the only guide as to which post office needed to handle the final delivery. Postcodes and mechanical sorting would have improved both speed and reliability quite noticeably.

But parcels are still sorted by hand, I think. Human fallibility being what it is, parcels will end up in the wrong piles occasionally. But there are ways to organise sorting depts to minimise these incidents, so that they don't happen anywhere near as often as we seem to observe.

We're much much more likely to hear about a parcel which goes astray than one which arrives as expected.

That's a good point, out of curiosity I checked my Amazon account, it shows 84 orders, 83 of which must have occurred without a hitch.

The only one that ever gets talked about is when the driver left £800 worth of electronics on the doorstep without even ringing the bell, and recorded the delivery as handed to the recipient.

That 1% overturns all the good of the other 99%.

As a counter to my own point, over on stardot there's a very long thread about nice things which turned up in the post:
https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic ... start=3000

I find it amusing that it is cheaper - by an order of magnitude - to ship a small package from China to US than sending the same size package across the street.

But I suppose it makes sense, considering that it's cheaper to ship a shipping container from China to Long Beach than truck the same container 50 miles inland. That's what happens when you kill railroads. A coal-powered steam engine could deliver our mail cheaper and with less pollution. Progress.

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. ...Jan van de Snepscheut