Delivery on Tuesday 21st, or Wednesday 22nd, or Thursday 23rd?
Could be either, according to eBay.
Yes, I know that they're "estimated" dates, but FFS the least that eBay could do is get their two estimates to match!
Imagine having to book time off work to be at home to receive these items - a gaffer wouldn't be too chuffed if I asked for three days off to receive one delivery!
For many years some of the world's most eminent physicists have laboured hard to prove that some objects can be in more than one place at the same time, thus proving Einstein right even though he thought that he was wrong.
Well, they need not have gone to all that trouble. All they had to do was to use eBay to order something from the States via USPS for delivery in the UK, and then use the internet to track it.
According to the tracking tech, here are all of the places where my parcel was known to be at the same time this morning...
According to eBay, it had been with me for 2 days:
According to the Royal Mail site it was at their international mail centre at Heathrow "being made ready for despatch overseas"...:
but clicking the "Where has my item been?" button told a different story:
And the good old USPS site deemed it to have been delivered, but didn't state that they had delivered it to the Royal Mail and not to me:
I printed off all of the pics above and thrust them into the hands of the counter-jockey at the local sorting-office. He looked from one print to another, and another, and another, and back again, with a look of incredulity on his face.
They had my parcel. There was no Import Duty or Excise Duty, but it would cost me a Royal Mail International Handling Fee of a tenner plus V.A.T. to possess it, which was more that I'd paid the USPS to transport it from Port Saint Lucie to Heathrow via Miami, and more than the cost of the item inside.
But hey, cutting-edge science doesn't come cheap!
And I suppose that paying a burly sorting-office bloke £11.23 to handle my small package has some comedy value 🙂
I'm not going to declare whether I'm for Bremain or for Brexit.
All I will say is that I am against piss-poor vote-dredging using crap like this leaflet which arrived today:
On closer scrutiny, one sees Old Glory on display at a supposedly-EU top table:
WTF? Really?
You may recall a recent exchange of comments on here in which I said that "the RM around here are not exactly held in high regard".
Well...
One of their staff has been collared for stealing the stuff he should have been delivering.
I know this to be true because the Royal Mail's regional Investigations Manager has sent me an opened and empty package, addressed to me, that was recovered from a member of the Royal Mail staff. The original contents of this package have not been recovered, as far as I'm aware.
This package should have been delivered to me way back in September. At that time I contacted the sender who kindly sent a second item to replace the first one that didn't get delivered.
The criminal investigation now in progress should see the sender compensated for that first item, which is a good thing. It should also see the offender fined, jailed and/or being made to do community service (which, hopefully, won't be helping out the Royal Mail during the Christmas Rush).
What it probably won't do is compensate for any items stolen for which there is no proven link to the sender or to the intended recipient. I was lucky - they found the empty package and it had my name and address on it. I wonder how many other such empty packages have been destroyed or otherwise disposed of, thus breaking the thread of traceability.
I do have a fair old list of other stuff that's been declared "lost in the post" during the last couple of years. I'll be sending that list, and the evidence that backs it up, to the Investigations Manager sometime soon. Hopefully he'll be able to find some of the stuff, or evidence of it having been stolen instead of delivered.
I'll keep you... erm... posted 
It all looks genuine and official, very slick.
I wonder how many folk fall for it.
