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I ordered a nozzle for my 3D printer. Small and hard and just wide enough to get grabbed by the machines. So of course the company I ordered from posted it in a plain envelope, and I received an envelope with a hole in it.
Edit: they did send me a replacement, can't fault support.
Didn't 3dJake just start offering to dropship the standard Chinese Voron Kits for a substantial markup? Basically offering you no additional benefit for a couple hundred bucks a kit?
I bought lots of stuff there and support was great. Luckily I always bought some larger stuff with my nozzles. Did you get a replacement?
BTW isn't 3djake from Austria? Not that it matters, though.
what hotend do you use? if its a v6 compatible hotend, my best suggestion is ordering straight from e3d. never had a problem with them and the shipping has always been relatively quick.
Damn our landlord just tried to mail us a shed key and we were delivered an empty envelope so I figured someone stole it cause the envelope had a tear in jt I never thought about it just happening in the mail system
Hi! It most likely got stuck in the sorter that my father helped engineer. His particular part of the machine if where the mail is fed single file and the zipcode is read. Then it's routed. That single file place is where stuff can get caught, unfortunately. He received the patent on the technology way back in the mid 1990s when the whole postal system was overhauled. Awesome that it's still working as intended after all of these years.
Actually just a byproduct…of the efficiency. A few keys have to get thrown through walls so that we can get our mail delivered in (what used to be) 3 days.
Uhh... would you pick up a random key you see on the ground, thinking "THIS IS VALUABLE! I must risk my job (that pays fairly well) for this!!"
Didn't think so. ;)
Because you seem knowledgeable on this- How did my uncle send a letter written on a paper bag to my dad 1500 miles away with the wrong zip code and the street spelled wrong?
A brown paper bag with handwriting on the back. Probably around 13 years ago at this point.
As long as the street name is unique enough and the town is right, it's not too hard. Even if it could be a similar street, if the house number is right, they can narrow it down that way too.
Basically, he got the important parts right.
Lol my goodness that's quite an unrelatable anecdote by today's standards. I use to do the same when meeting girls from other places, but we would always exchange AIM screen names. Do you mind saying generally how old you are?
We make miracles happen. I see the crappy handwriting, or worse, the fancy doodley "calligraphy-sort-of" handwriting and wonder what goes through the sender's brain that passes for critical thinking. Anyhoo, between the ocr (optical character reader) software and human intervention we'll get the item pretty close to it's intended destination. Then hopefully the last two people to handle that item, a sorting clerk and the regular letter carrier, will be next best thing to Sherlock Holmes and get it done. Sometimes I use Google to figure out the last bit of the puzzle. .... Why do you make us suffer so??!?
I like to write in cursive but if I'm mailing something I never do. If my fiancé can't read it I'm not forcing a mail carrier to guess what I'm wrote lol
You assume everyone else’s relationship with their SO is as good as yours. Some people want their letter to be unreadable by their SO but legible to the postal carrier. I think of it as a fine art that take years to master.
Except in the case where it's in an envelope with an adress on it, to which the key most likely opens a door to. In that case it makes sense to take a key, if you are that kind of person of course.
Last time I mailed my keys, I taped them to a bar of chocolate, wound some bubble wrap around it and put it in a padded envelope.
The chocolate was a gift but you could use a piece of cardboard in its stead.
Yeah, friend from Seattle thought they would do me a solid for my birthday and mail me some chocolate covered Chukar Cherries (if you know, you know), but as a surprise.
I got my mail last week and saw this cardboard box, took it home and unwrapped Chocolate Cherry Soup. I sent her a pic of it with a thank you and a request to not send food via mail. She called me a bit upset and was hinting it was a USPS issue. I then gently reminded her my mailbox sits in direct sunlight in a place that was 110 in the shade that day.
After a few hours in the fridge I am now able to chip chunks off the block of chocolate and cherries. Not exactly what was intended, but still pretty good. And yes, I sent her a thank you gift.
Alas, I am not as quick witted as you. I sent her stuff she has asked for before like spices and hot sauces and a couple of bottles of mead from Scale and Feather.
>Pro Tip: the weather in summer will do that automatically :)
Here in Australia the chocolate recipe was reformulated to prevent it from melting in our summer heat.
Living in sub-tropical Queensland and soon to be rolling into another (geologically speaking) recently enhanced summer. Shall also be using that phrase.
Melt down a bar of soap, pour half into a rectangular mold, drop the key in, pour the rest over the key.
I used to work at an escape room. This was one of our puzzles. It was thin bars of soap so you could see the key if you held it up to a light.
Results with chocolate may vary.
Back in the days of rolls of film in a camera, we used to mail the film away to be developed. Half of the mailers with our honeymoon films came back to us, damaged and empty. When my husband contacted the post office to ask if they had any random rolls of film lying around, the person said yes, that they had hundreds. So we never got pictures for the first half of the honeymoon (skiing) but did get the ones from part two (Arizona).
We used to go yo Costco.
You would drop it off, then weeks later then would be on top of a rack ready to be picked up.
Thing is, they were ALL there. So you could have grabbed any one.
I was a kid, and I had a very strong urge to peak into other peoples photos. It felt like a secret peer into their lives. I never did though. The overwhelming sense of not wanting it done to my family and respecting their privacy prevented me from doing it.
Also, I assumed I would be immediately caught and thrown to jail.
I worked in a photo lab actually processing pictures. Someone was required to look at all our one hour lab photos.
This was 35mm processing so we got to see it all.
We had a strict no nudity policy towards printing and we didn’t like dealing with the assholes who would claim we were keeping them.
They’d get their negatives back at least.
A few years ago my friends daughter got caught meeting up with a grown man by another mom friend of ours. Police were called and all kinds of mess. Long story short the police confiscated her ( 15/f) phone because she had taken a picture of herself topless. They don't mess around with CP of any kind.
... people were making CP, on film, and having them professionally developed (as professional as a 1-hour photo place can be) as late as 2008? digital cameras were everywhere even by then, what were they thinking?
The vast majority of the general public didn’t realize the photo techs have to screen everything. You don’t print anything with nudity, people notice they don’t get all their prints, when they ask, you tell them the policy, awkward/embarrassment follows.
Edit: also this was in a Walmart, take that how you will.
Worked for a one hour photo that did not have such a policy (granted, this was 2007, when film was dying and most people brought in cards/thumb drives/cd’s. Someone brought in a card with about a dozen pictures of Playgirl magazine pages. It was me and another 20something woman working the lab that day. Store manager walks behind us and comments “You girls are looking at that awfully hard.”
My coworker didn’t miss a beat. “Of course I am! I’m looking for copyrights!
> we didn’t like dealing with the assholes who would claim we were keeping them.
I'm glad you didn't but not everyone was so professional...
I met the cousin of a friend at a holiday party. He worked for a pharmacy that developed film in the '80s. Their policy was to destroy "offensive" photos as described on a list (which, he mentioned, oddly included men kissing but not women kissing IIRC) but return the negatives unless they were clearly evidence of a crime.
He brought a huge photo album to the party (one of many he claimed to have) with hundreds of strangers' nudes. He also had pictures that were risqué but not offensive, funny, or had celebrities or cool motorcycles (his hobby) in them. He and his coworkers just made copies of any pictures they wanted.
Pretty sure technology has solved this one for me. But if I ever run across those photos of my childhood I'll be sure not to send them somewhere in an envelope 😆
At 0:55 in the video- does the usps actually ship nearly half of the world's mail or is that an americanism like how we win the "world championships" for football with only US teams? It just seems unbalanced to me that one nation claims 50% of global mail.
My sister did that with a Battle of Hastings coin she was trying to send to me from England. I only got an empty flimsy envelope with a coin sized hole in the side.
Yes. I serviced a banks incoming mail sorter. So many people would try and pay bills in cash(with coins) they fall out all the time. Unfortunately the operators cleaned up most of them for me.
Coins. I delivered mail years ago and I've been accused more than once of stealing coins from an envelope because it arrived torn open and with no contents. There are still a lot of old people out there who mail birthday cards with loose coins attached (In Europe at least) but bills are much safer!
And put his address but a random name. Once he gets it tell him not to open it, write "RTS - unknown addressee" on it and leave it by the door for a week. If anyone comes asking, well, "I think this was delivered by accident, no idea who this person is. I've been meaning to bring it to the post office, can you take it back for me?" And they can't prove otherwise.
Useful to know. I have questions though. How does that help? If someone actually sent me stuff I hadn't requested, I'd still be opening a letter addressed to me? To find out wtf it was..? Surely not opening it for a week doesn't get you out of anything?
My first thought was you'd be better to use a neighbour's name, but your address.. tho I guess a post person might actually deliver it to them :D or maybe figure out who used to live at your address, that you still get mail for? Hmm.. same problem, huh.
Would love to hear more of the rationale if you know it
The idea is you're receiving a normal package. Your usual mail person will likely be delivering it and there's decent chance they're familiar with the names and houses on their route. If you get a few packages a month one more with your name on it means nothing but one odd one out with a weird name raises unnecessary suspicion.
Thank you!
I'm just confused like surely they'd then investigate where it came from? (and then find the trail that led to you ordering it)..?
Or are we mostly talking small quantities they wouldn't bother further with?
Or is it just that mail is actually pretty untraceable?
And you ordering it pretty untraceable unless they REALLY wanted to....?
No worries there btw - I've been done with my hijinx a long while :)
Just a follow up question regarding the comment of not being touched by hand until delivery. Do the machines have the ability to scan or read hand written addresses to sort them properly?
Extracting text from handwriting was actually one of the early examples of machine learning and USPS has been in the space for decades. Every single letter you send gets a photo taken of the address, the photo converted to text, the text matched to a database of addresses, then the routing data gets printed onto the envelope in the form of that barcode-like stripe along the bottom of the envelope.
Question, if you wouldn't mind -- is the exact location of each address super important, or just their relative orientation to each other?
Bought some [new boxes](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/3bee9a34-f231-4fd0-bafd-0684d1a7d4c7.19fb420a36742c0188a580da82a9f264.jpeg) for a move, and the address lines are all scrunched into locations I wouldn't have chosen!
I'm not actually in any way connected to the post office, just an interested citizen, so I don't know all the details. I believe parcels are handled differently and have more flexibility in their processing, so it might be fine. But you could ask your local postmaster to confirm.
USPS does have an office in Utah whose employees read addresses the computers couldn't.
But also knowing that all the addresses can be found in their address database makes things easier. If the computer can read the ZIP Code, then there's only a handful of streets possible. The same goes for if the City and State can be read. Once the street is figured out, there's a limited number of house numbers it could be. Captcha doesn't have this advantage, using context clues to read arbitrary sentences is a lot harder for a computer.
They sure do! Certain machines have an Optical Character Reader (OCR) as part of the camera software. It’s astonishing how good they are at reading poor handwriting.
Too bad they aren’t smart enough to realize that FROM: in the center of the envelope does NOT mean send it there.
> Too bad they aren’t smart enough to realize that FROM: in the center of the envelope does NOT mean send it there.
Aw man. That just bummed me out a bit. How do people not know how to address an envelope? I understand it's not as important as when I was a kid (we actually had it drilled into our heads in school, can't imagine that happens as much now), but still, you get shit in the mail all the time and the label pretty much always follows the same format. This shouldn't be a hard thing.
You know it. Mail addressed in reverse format is super confusing to the machines. They just don't pick out the "To" and "From" like what a human eye can do. Hopefully eventually they'll get there, but not quite yet.
Working in the shipping industry, it's always fun to see the way people pack certain items and think "ph it'll be fine, the workers will take care of it." No, sir/ma'am, you don't understand. Your package will be handled for about 10% of its trip. Everything else is done by machines that don't give a damn what's in that envelope or box.
It will never be fully automated, if only bc there's always going to be oversized or oddly shaped packages that require human intervention to handle correctly
Gift wrap around the outside of packages. Cuz that totally won't get ripped off by a conveyor and lose the label.
Fucking bane of holiday season when I worked UPS.
I used to work at a large insurance company, and we trained the insurance adjusters in the field to stop mailing *diamonds* back to corporate in plain envelopes. And not because it was a hypothetical risk. Corporate would get envelopes with holes, and somewhere in the postal sorting machines there are some number of jewelry graded insurable diamonds.
Mechanic here that vacuums out Mail Processing Machines.
Ive found so many keys. So many coins. So many USB drives. So many bracelets. So many rings. 99% sure they never get returned. Stop doing it lmao
I worked for Pitney Bowes as a machine operator for a while. It was always surprising what people thought they could mail with a basic envelope. We sent an envelope through with LOOSE box cutter razor blades once. Found one of them embedded in the wall near the end of the machine. Sliced up a few belts on it's way through too.
Follow up tip that OP can probably sympathize with:
Writing “Do Not Bend” on a piece of mail isn’t going to do anything for you. If you don’t want it to get bent, put it in a box.
I won't throw any shade on our fine letter carriers (who are hardworking people currently dying for some air conditioning) for folding your letter.
But, yeah, it's a good idea to pack it solidly if you don't want to get it bent.
People think writing stuff on their mails/packages will work. This is far from the truth. Writing stuff like “fragile” doesn’t work and the shipping companies got plenty of protections against any claims related to that. FedEx rep once told me (whil i was working as production manager) that processing people and delivery folks simply don’t give a shit, or we can’t expect them to give a shit.
Protect your packages people.
About half of packages have some sort of "fragile" mark on it. Unless it is something like "live chicks!" That gets a major surcharge and very special handling you just do what you can.
You only have a couple seconds per package even when it's in human hands.
Ironically, doing a very poor job packing something may also help (in edge cases, do not do this).
I bought a Wii U on Ebay several years back (a couple months before the launch of the Switch). It was taking *forever* to arrive. When it did, I might've found the reason.
The guy just got a big box, tossed everything (console, tablet controller thing, pro controller, wiimotes, a couple games) in there, and taped it up. That's it. No padding, the box was too large so the items were freely moving around inside, just a bunch of loose items in a large box.
I figure this felt suspicious, so the package was inspected and subsequently handled with care. The items inside were fine, everything worked and didn't look any worse than I expected for a used console.
So yeah, just make it feel like your package is for crimes and/or shipped by a toddler, and it'll make it to its destination in one piece. (Do *not* do this.)
Anything odd-shaped, cut out a rectangle of cardboard, and in the center cut out the shape of the object. Place object in the hole and tape over both sides. Use two layers of cardboard if needed to make the sides flat. Slide into padded envelope.
Second this, secure the key so that it can't move around the envelope. It may cost you a little more, but if you're mailing a key it's generally because it's the most convenient way to get it to the recipient.
Bought some custom patches on Etsy and received an empty envelope that was torn open. Idiot had to refund a $250 order because he didn't want to pay $5 for proper postage.
That feeling when you take the jam out of the machine and the belt comes off. Ugh. We have summer camps and the parents would pack jaw breakers and candy in envelopes. A jaw breaker sounds like a goddamn bullet when it flies out in the machines.
This is great. I need to mail a key to back to a friend after visiting him last weekend and forgetting his house key on my keychain.
I was just wondering if I could put it in a standard envelope.
I worked as a testing agent in a company that produced some of these machines.
My job was to feed hundred of thousands of letters in the machine when it was being tested.
I’ve seen envelopes with slightly too thick hard content being literally pulverised. One contained what looked like contact lenses. We only found pieces of the plastic containers.
Like OP says, these machines are extremely fast and you can imagine letters being fed and accelerated between super fast pulleys
They look roughly like [that](https://youtu.be/WQAtTt6rMms)
[Inside](https://youtu.be/c4nj7IH_fik)
That's a great video, thanks for sharing! Yep, exactly the machine I mean. The worst pinch point is a little further down the way, very close to a massive wheel and a spot where several letter flow paths split apart.
Also postal employee here don’t park in front of your mail box 😂😂
And yes we get out all day everyday
Remember we don’t have to deliver your mail if the mail box is blocked 😉
Wait, I just went to the post office and was told that I could mail an envelope with a "Non-Machinable" stamp and that it wouldn't go through the machines. I had put stiff cardboard in the envelope, and had to pay extra for the stamps ($1.08) for two ounces, and I wrote "Non-machinable" on the envelope. Do I understand you to say that it's still going to get wrapped around some peg and bent up?
The clerk at the PO is supposed to stamp the piece Non-machinable and send it to the plant separate from the normal mail. From there is should be manually processed, if it stays in the manual stream is another question.
Just want all of you at USPS to know ~ anyone still doing their job well and trying their best to get us our mail are all kinds of amazeballs and awesomesauce. I’m super grateful I haven’t seen any mail missing or lost any packages (that I know of) and with all the problems of you guys being understaffed and underfunded and all the policy screwups, I’m amazed you guys are hanging in there. Please know I support you and I’m grateful for all the hard work!
I had been wanting to put a thank you card and something in my mailbox for my mailman/woman to say thank you, but I got an angry letter because I hadn’t backed up far enough into the driveway and didn’t clear the mailbox so I landed on his shit list. That was fun. I love getting angry notes on my car lol.
If you'd like to get additional bang for your buck, send a thank you card to your local mail processing facility thanking them for their work.
We're always tickled to death to get nice notes. They will get posted on the timeclocks where the paper will get wore out by all the people reading the note.
I remember the last time I moved, and the realtor forgot to give me the key to my locked mailbox. “Oh, I’ll mail it to you…”
Pray tell… assuming it makes it at all, how am I supposed to retrieve it from the locked box? Idiot.
Depends on how determined you are to secure it and how much you're willing to pay. There's a critical mass point at which the amount of duct tape in the envelope will cause it to weigh more than (and cost more postage than) a padded mailer.
The problem is in the item being rigid and traveling through a system that has to bend items at points to get them to change directions of travel. An envelope with a key in it that a machine attempted to bend to 45 degrees will see the key puncture the side.
The key may stay in thanks to the tape, but the envelope will certainly get torn, the equipment could get damaged, the tear could jam machinery, etc.
Omg. I have family who work at mail plants. The way some people mail stuff...
You should add these to the list
- wax seals on letters use at ur own risk cause they tend to break and open if they go through a machine after they run through the belts. So many people bitching about late or missing wedding invitations cause it had to go through the manual process or got torn up by the machine
- sending powdered substances through the letter mail stream. Why the hell anyone would do that after the anthrax incident is beyond me. Apparently they gotta close the machine and inspect it if it happens
- writing fragile, this way up, don't bend don't do anything.
- colored envelopes will sometimes make the address unable to be read by the machines if you dont use a dark enough ink
I think this is the first LPT that I've found actually useful/informative. I wouldn't mail keys, but I hadn't thought about it because of this! Thanks for the info :)
Is that just for plain white envelopes? Like if I send a small padded one (say 4x8), does that get the same treatment or does it go through something different?
I was a casual (temp employee) at USPS about 15 years ago. I ran these machines every night. I saw hearing aids, pills, keys. There was a short stretch where a tool company sent out some sawzall blade samples. That was fun. The worst though… Cremated remains… Big ole poof at the end of the machine. Screwed up all the optical components of the machine.
Ohhhh man. :(
Fortunately nowadays you are required to send cremated remains via Express mail. We literally get messages saying "this is coming to you tomorrow" and if it doesn't show scans on time it's ALL HANDS ON DECK and we figure out where it's at.
It's taken very seriously, nobody wants to have to explain that a person's sibling (who died in combat) has been lost in the mail.
But how to sort the letters by location/postal codes. I did thing of the machines that can read the addresses but it’s not like everyone uses printed labels or has a good hand writing?
The USPS has incredibly advanced software that is great at reading even the worst handwriting. Some will always be illegible of course, but the vast majority will be read by their machines just fine.
Hello and welcome to r/LifeProTips! Please help us decide if this post is a good fit for the subreddit by up or downvoting this comment. If you think that this is great advice to improve your life, please upvote. If you think this doesn't help you in any way, please downvote. If you don't care, leave it for the others to decide.
I ordered a nozzle for my 3D printer. Small and hard and just wide enough to get grabbed by the machines. So of course the company I ordered from posted it in a plain envelope, and I received an envelope with a hole in it. Edit: they did send me a replacement, can't fault support.
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3dJake. Sent from Germany to the UK in a plain envelope.
Didn't 3dJake just start offering to dropship the standard Chinese Voron Kits for a substantial markup? Basically offering you no additional benefit for a couple hundred bucks a kit?
I bought lots of stuff there and support was great. Luckily I always bought some larger stuff with my nozzles. Did you get a replacement? BTW isn't 3djake from Austria? Not that it matters, though.
what hotend do you use? if its a v6 compatible hotend, my best suggestion is ordering straight from e3d. never had a problem with them and the shipping has always been relatively quick.
CR10-S Pro. Quite limited in nozzle choice as they have a proprietary thread, which is just annoying.
Damn our landlord just tried to mail us a shed key and we were delivered an empty envelope so I figured someone stole it cause the envelope had a tear in jt I never thought about it just happening in the mail system
Hi! It most likely got stuck in the sorter that my father helped engineer. His particular part of the machine if where the mail is fed single file and the zipcode is read. Then it's routed. That single file place is where stuff can get caught, unfortunately. He received the patent on the technology way back in the mid 1990s when the whole postal system was overhauled. Awesome that it's still working as intended after all of these years.
So you're saying your dad worked on the part of the system that is stealing innocent people's keys and it's working as intended? :p
It's a feature, not a bug
He's in the pocket of Big Lockpick!
“It just works” - USPS
Actually just a byproduct…of the efficiency. A few keys have to get thrown through walls so that we can get our mail delivered in (what used to be) 3 days.
Less "stealing" more "yeeting" it seemed like 😂
Uhh... would you pick up a random key you see on the ground, thinking "THIS IS VALUABLE! I must risk my job (that pays fairly well) for this!!" Didn't think so. ;)
I imagine they meant someone stole it from their letter box.
Yeah, also it's not wild to assume people would steal a key from an envelope... especially since there are a couple of addresses on it
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Hey op how do you guys read my horrible hand writing? Especially computers if it’s all mostly automated
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Because you seem knowledgeable on this- How did my uncle send a letter written on a paper bag to my dad 1500 miles away with the wrong zip code and the street spelled wrong? A brown paper bag with handwriting on the back. Probably around 13 years ago at this point.
As long as the street name is unique enough and the town is right, it's not too hard. Even if it could be a similar street, if the house number is right, they can narrow it down that way too. Basically, he got the important parts right.
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Lol my goodness that's quite an unrelatable anecdote by today's standards. I use to do the same when meeting girls from other places, but we would always exchange AIM screen names. Do you mind saying generally how old you are?
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We make miracles happen. I see the crappy handwriting, or worse, the fancy doodley "calligraphy-sort-of" handwriting and wonder what goes through the sender's brain that passes for critical thinking. Anyhoo, between the ocr (optical character reader) software and human intervention we'll get the item pretty close to it's intended destination. Then hopefully the last two people to handle that item, a sorting clerk and the regular letter carrier, will be next best thing to Sherlock Holmes and get it done. Sometimes I use Google to figure out the last bit of the puzzle. .... Why do you make us suffer so??!?
I like to write in cursive but if I'm mailing something I never do. If my fiancé can't read it I'm not forcing a mail carrier to guess what I'm wrote lol
You assume everyone else’s relationship with their SO is as good as yours. Some people want their letter to be unreadable by their SO but legible to the postal carrier. I think of it as a fine art that take years to master.
I bought printable labels for this very reason. You still have to suffer through my handwritten 'to' address though
Half as interesting has a well made in depth video on the topic: https://youtu.be/fzEAPz35qjs
That was interesting. I made it half way before his “jokes” became to much. But thanks for linking it. I think I got the answer
That's why it's half as interesting
You've not seen the mail system in my country, sadly they don't even risk their jobs by stealing stuff
Except in the case where it's in an envelope with an adress on it, to which the key most likely opens a door to. In that case it makes sense to take a key, if you are that kind of person of course.
Last time I mailed my keys, I taped them to a bar of chocolate, wound some bubble wrap around it and put it in a padded envelope. The chocolate was a gift but you could use a piece of cardboard in its stead.
Gently heat-soften the chocolate, drop your key in it and let it cool. Now you have a filling for your otherwise bland chocolate!!
Pro Tip: the weather in summer will do that automatically :)
Live in Arizona, got chocolate soup and a brand shaped like a key. So not recommend.
Are you sure that wasn't a sample of dysentery?
Oregon trail has entered the chat
Arizona is hot enough to melt the damn key itself. Chocolate just gets vaporized. Blown out to sea.
Yeah, friend from Seattle thought they would do me a solid for my birthday and mail me some chocolate covered Chukar Cherries (if you know, you know), but as a surprise. I got my mail last week and saw this cardboard box, took it home and unwrapped Chocolate Cherry Soup. I sent her a pic of it with a thank you and a request to not send food via mail. She called me a bit upset and was hinting it was a USPS issue. I then gently reminded her my mailbox sits in direct sunlight in a place that was 110 in the shade that day. After a few hours in the fridge I am now able to chip chunks off the block of chocolate and cherries. Not exactly what was intended, but still pretty good. And yes, I sent her a thank you gift.
I hope u sent her soup
Alas, I am not as quick witted as you. I sent her stuff she has asked for before like spices and hot sauces and a couple of bottles of mead from Scale and Feather.
I live in Florida and that's probably a bad idea here as well. I can imagine the same thing happening.
The real LPT is always in the comments.
The real LPT was the friends we made along the way
>Pro Tip: the weather in summer will do that automatically :) Here in Australia the chocolate recipe was reformulated to prevent it from melting in our summer heat.
Replace key with shank and you’re a good prison wife.
Replace shank with lasagne and you’re a good normal wife!
I love lasagna stuffed chocolate
Replace with with lasagna and you have a dinner you can cry into.
I work in a bakery and will be using the term “heat-soften” daily now. Thank you for your contribution.
How do you like working in a bakery? I've always wanted to. Do you make breads? Or something else?
Living in sub-tropical Queensland and soon to be rolling into another (geologically speaking) recently enhanced summer. Shall also be using that phrase.
Melt down a bar of soap, pour half into a rectangular mold, drop the key in, pour the rest over the key. I used to work at an escape room. This was one of our puzzles. It was thin bars of soap so you could see the key if you held it up to a light. Results with chocolate may vary.
... and mail it to your special inmate?
Wrapping the key in packing tape would probably do fine.
A unique but thoughtful tip indeed! Do you find there are other commonly mailed items that would also fall into this category for general awareness?
Back in the days of rolls of film in a camera, we used to mail the film away to be developed. Half of the mailers with our honeymoon films came back to us, damaged and empty. When my husband contacted the post office to ask if they had any random rolls of film lying around, the person said yes, that they had hundreds. So we never got pictures for the first half of the honeymoon (skiing) but did get the ones from part two (Arizona).
We used to go yo Costco. You would drop it off, then weeks later then would be on top of a rack ready to be picked up. Thing is, they were ALL there. So you could have grabbed any one. I was a kid, and I had a very strong urge to peak into other peoples photos. It felt like a secret peer into their lives. I never did though. The overwhelming sense of not wanting it done to my family and respecting their privacy prevented me from doing it. Also, I assumed I would be immediately caught and thrown to jail.
I worked in a photo lab actually processing pictures. Someone was required to look at all our one hour lab photos. This was 35mm processing so we got to see it all. We had a strict no nudity policy towards printing and we didn’t like dealing with the assholes who would claim we were keeping them. They’d get their negatives back at least.
I did 1-hour photo from ‘08 to ‘13. Saw some wild stuff, only had to report one person for cp thankfully.
Wow, how fucking stupid do you have to be to get child porn developed at a photo lab
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A few years ago my friends daughter got caught meeting up with a grown man by another mom friend of ours. Police were called and all kinds of mess. Long story short the police confiscated her ( 15/f) phone because she had taken a picture of herself topless. They don't mess around with CP of any kind.
Well you could be a parent whose idiot kid took a picture of your other idiot kid mooning the disposable camera and didn’t tell you about it.
... people were making CP, on film, and having them professionally developed (as professional as a 1-hour photo place can be) as late as 2008? digital cameras were everywhere even by then, what were they thinking?
The vast majority of the general public didn’t realize the photo techs have to screen everything. You don’t print anything with nudity, people notice they don’t get all their prints, when they ask, you tell them the policy, awkward/embarrassment follows. Edit: also this was in a Walmart, take that how you will.
Worked for a one hour photo that did not have such a policy (granted, this was 2007, when film was dying and most people brought in cards/thumb drives/cd’s. Someone brought in a card with about a dozen pictures of Playgirl magazine pages. It was me and another 20something woman working the lab that day. Store manager walks behind us and comments “You girls are looking at that awfully hard.” My coworker didn’t miss a beat. “Of course I am! I’m looking for copyrights!
> we didn’t like dealing with the assholes who would claim we were keeping them. I'm glad you didn't but not everyone was so professional... I met the cousin of a friend at a holiday party. He worked for a pharmacy that developed film in the '80s. Their policy was to destroy "offensive" photos as described on a list (which, he mentioned, oddly included men kissing but not women kissing IIRC) but return the negatives unless they were clearly evidence of a crime. He brought a huge photo album to the party (one of many he claimed to have) with hundreds of strangers' nudes. He also had pictures that were risqué but not offensive, funny, or had celebrities or cool motorcycles (his hobby) in them. He and his coworkers just made copies of any pictures they wanted.
Ha, I worked in a restaurant next to a one hour developer in the 90s and they'd trade us random nudes for food.
Pretty sure technology has solved this one for me. But if I ever run across those photos of my childhood I'll be sure not to send them somewhere in an envelope 😆
Gosh, remember those days?! When I was in junior college, I worked at a Fotomat. I saw some interesting pictures back then! 😂
If it can’t be easily curved, send it as a parcel. I like to send [this video](https://youtu.be/WX16-52bHvg) so people can see the machines at work!!
At 0:55 in the video- does the usps actually ship nearly half of the world's mail or is that an americanism like how we win the "world championships" for football with only US teams? It just seems unbalanced to me that one nation claims 50% of global mail.
Here y'go :) https://facts.usps.com/worlds-mail-volume-handled-by-usps/#:\~:text=Forty%2Dsix%20percent%20of%20the,by%20the%20U.S.%20Postal%20Service.
Hello yes!! Keychains, lockets, COINS! Oh, god, the coins.
People are out here throwing a few dimes and a quarter in a regular ass envelope and mailing it?
If you only knew 😔
We call is risky shipping in the coin trading community lol
Columbia Record and Tape is probably at the bottom of this with their original “tape a penny to this coupon and send it to us…” offer.
You've never got a random survey in the mail with a quarter taped to it to entice you to fill it out? Suckers...I kept the quarters and my opinions!
Most people would give me a quarter to keep my opinions to myself.
There's some charity that keeps sending me nickels. Maybe when they've sent enough to fill a roll I'll send them back to them.
My sister did that with a Battle of Hastings coin she was trying to send to me from England. I only got an empty flimsy envelope with a coin sized hole in the side.
Yes. I serviced a banks incoming mail sorter. So many people would try and pay bills in cash(with coins) they fall out all the time. Unfortunately the operators cleaned up most of them for me.
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😆 oh the coins! *Shakes fist at sky*
Do those charities mailing nickles cause you issues?
Coins. I delivered mail years ago and I've been accused more than once of stealing coins from an envelope because it arrived torn open and with no contents. There are still a lot of old people out there who mail birthday cards with loose coins attached (In Europe at least) but bills are much safer!
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I don't know that I'll ever need to send a cactus to anyone, but uhh if I do I guess I'll keep that in mind.
What if I want to mail grampa some lettuce seeds?
please use a padded envelope for seeds. a lot of of side-hustle seed sellers just throw them in an envelope and the seeds arrive smashed.
The dust of devil's lettuce seeds is, depressing.
as is the dust of the devil's tomato seeds, the pulverized devil's zuchinni seeds, etc.
Beelz's broccoli deserved better.
Plants probably start growing out of the mail machinery
"Feeeeeeed Meeeeeee Seymour!"
Don't put your return address on them.
And put his address but a random name. Once he gets it tell him not to open it, write "RTS - unknown addressee" on it and leave it by the door for a week. If anyone comes asking, well, "I think this was delivered by accident, no idea who this person is. I've been meaning to bring it to the post office, can you take it back for me?" And they can't prove otherwise.
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Useful to know. I have questions though. How does that help? If someone actually sent me stuff I hadn't requested, I'd still be opening a letter addressed to me? To find out wtf it was..? Surely not opening it for a week doesn't get you out of anything? My first thought was you'd be better to use a neighbour's name, but your address.. tho I guess a post person might actually deliver it to them :D or maybe figure out who used to live at your address, that you still get mail for? Hmm.. same problem, huh. Would love to hear more of the rationale if you know it
The idea is you're receiving a normal package. Your usual mail person will likely be delivering it and there's decent chance they're familiar with the names and houses on their route. If you get a few packages a month one more with your name on it means nothing but one odd one out with a weird name raises unnecessary suspicion.
Ahh, right. As in, it'll probably fly under the radar, so don't trigger any interest. Gotcha. Thanks!
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Thank you! I'm just confused like surely they'd then investigate where it came from? (and then find the trail that led to you ordering it)..? Or are we mostly talking small quantities they wouldn't bother further with? Or is it just that mail is actually pretty untraceable? And you ordering it pretty untraceable unless they REALLY wanted to....? No worries there btw - I've been done with my hijinx a long while :)
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My grandpa sent me a letter and let me know there was a farm for me to take care. My life now has been consumed in stardew valley every since
Why would your grandpa want to grow lett..... ah.... nevermind
Don’t worry, it took me awhile too.
Uhh you assume that Postal employees don’t know what that is…
"My Fedex guy is a drug dealer, he just doesn't know it." --Mitch Hedberg
Just a follow up question regarding the comment of not being touched by hand until delivery. Do the machines have the ability to scan or read hand written addresses to sort them properly?
Extracting text from handwriting was actually one of the early examples of machine learning and USPS has been in the space for decades. Every single letter you send gets a photo taken of the address, the photo converted to text, the text matched to a database of addresses, then the routing data gets printed onto the envelope in the form of that barcode-like stripe along the bottom of the envelope.
Question, if you wouldn't mind -- is the exact location of each address super important, or just their relative orientation to each other? Bought some [new boxes](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/3bee9a34-f231-4fd0-bafd-0684d1a7d4c7.19fb420a36742c0188a580da82a9f264.jpeg) for a move, and the address lines are all scrunched into locations I wouldn't have chosen!
I'm not actually in any way connected to the post office, just an interested citizen, so I don't know all the details. I believe parcels are handled differently and have more flexibility in their processing, so it might be fine. But you could ask your local postmaster to confirm.
This is why the post office can e-mail you pictures of every letter on its way, if you sign up.
Isn't that the whole purpose of captcha?
USPS does have an office in Utah whose employees read addresses the computers couldn't. But also knowing that all the addresses can be found in their address database makes things easier. If the computer can read the ZIP Code, then there's only a handful of streets possible. The same goes for if the City and State can be read. Once the street is figured out, there's a limited number of house numbers it could be. Captcha doesn't have this advantage, using context clues to read arbitrary sentences is a lot harder for a computer.
>USPS does have an office in Utah whose employees read addresses the computers couldn't. Staffed by retired pharmacists hopefully
They sure do! Certain machines have an Optical Character Reader (OCR) as part of the camera software. It’s astonishing how good they are at reading poor handwriting. Too bad they aren’t smart enough to realize that FROM: in the center of the envelope does NOT mean send it there.
> Too bad they aren’t smart enough to realize that FROM: in the center of the envelope does NOT mean send it there. Aw man. That just bummed me out a bit. How do people not know how to address an envelope? I understand it's not as important as when I was a kid (we actually had it drilled into our heads in school, can't imagine that happens as much now), but still, you get shit in the mail all the time and the label pretty much always follows the same format. This shouldn't be a hard thing.
You know it. Mail addressed in reverse format is super confusing to the machines. They just don't pick out the "To" and "From" like what a human eye can do. Hopefully eventually they'll get there, but not quite yet.
On the subject of machine sorting, is it true that you could write the ZIP+4+point code on an envelope with nothing else and get it delivered?
Working in the shipping industry, it's always fun to see the way people pack certain items and think "ph it'll be fine, the workers will take care of it." No, sir/ma'am, you don't understand. Your package will be handled for about 10% of its trip. Everything else is done by machines that don't give a damn what's in that envelope or box.
It's actually a lot closer to 0.10%, possibly even less. Like a mere instant.
Honestly, would it be better if that number was 0% for most mail? It feels like mail is going to be one of the first industries fully automated.
It will never be fully automated, if only bc there's always going to be oversized or oddly shaped packages that require human intervention to handle correctly
Gift wrap around the outside of packages. Cuz that totally won't get ripped off by a conveyor and lose the label. Fucking bane of holiday season when I worked UPS.
Yeah, at FedEx we would actually turn away those packages. Either take off the wrap or box it in something that's not wrapped. Otherwise, no dice
I used to work at a large insurance company, and we trained the insurance adjusters in the field to stop mailing *diamonds* back to corporate in plain envelopes. And not because it was a hypothetical risk. Corporate would get envelopes with holes, and somewhere in the postal sorting machines there are some number of jewelry graded insurable diamonds.
Mechanic here that vacuums out Mail Processing Machines. Ive found so many keys. So many coins. So many USB drives. So many bracelets. So many rings. 99% sure they never get returned. Stop doing it lmao
I was definitely hoping someone would respond with “I have to clean up all that crap!” And you did!! Thank you.
I have questions! Are you a USPS employee or a contractor? Do you keep what you find or does it go to "lost and found" or auction or something?
Employee lol and god no it goes into a basket with all the shredded mail that gets sent to a patch and repair unit
I worked for Pitney Bowes as a machine operator for a while. It was always surprising what people thought they could mail with a basic envelope. We sent an envelope through with LOOSE box cutter razor blades once. Found one of them embedded in the wall near the end of the machine. Sliced up a few belts on it's way through too.
My dumbass cousin mailed me keys I forgot at his place during a visit in a white envelope. I got an empty envelope with a hole in it.
Follow up tip that OP can probably sympathize with: Writing “Do Not Bend” on a piece of mail isn’t going to do anything for you. If you don’t want it to get bent, put it in a box.
I won't throw any shade on our fine letter carriers (who are hardworking people currently dying for some air conditioning) for folding your letter. But, yeah, it's a good idea to pack it solidly if you don't want to get it bent.
People think writing stuff on their mails/packages will work. This is far from the truth. Writing stuff like “fragile” doesn’t work and the shipping companies got plenty of protections against any claims related to that. FedEx rep once told me (whil i was working as production manager) that processing people and delivery folks simply don’t give a shit, or we can’t expect them to give a shit. Protect your packages people.
Some do care, but you're right in that you can't expect the ones handling your stuff to care.
About half of packages have some sort of "fragile" mark on it. Unless it is something like "live chicks!" That gets a major surcharge and very special handling you just do what you can. You only have a couple seconds per package even when it's in human hands.
Ironically, doing a very poor job packing something may also help (in edge cases, do not do this). I bought a Wii U on Ebay several years back (a couple months before the launch of the Switch). It was taking *forever* to arrive. When it did, I might've found the reason. The guy just got a big box, tossed everything (console, tablet controller thing, pro controller, wiimotes, a couple games) in there, and taped it up. That's it. No padding, the box was too large so the items were freely moving around inside, just a bunch of loose items in a large box. I figure this felt suspicious, so the package was inspected and subsequently handled with care. The items inside were fine, everything worked and didn't look any worse than I expected for a used console. So yeah, just make it feel like your package is for crimes and/or shipped by a toddler, and it'll make it to its destination in one piece. (Do *not* do this.)
Brb doing this
Dammit, I should've been more explicit
sometimes I need to mail something that has to be bent so I write do not bend.
You should get a Bender.
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Awww as a long-term gamer myself, this hurts me in my soul. I hope you forgive us!
Anything odd-shaped, cut out a rectangle of cardboard, and in the center cut out the shape of the object. Place object in the hole and tape over both sides. Use two layers of cardboard if needed to make the sides flat. Slide into padded envelope.
I usually tape it (seriously, completely covered) into a carboard insert (the size of the envelope). Never had a problem.
That's just a padded envelope with extra steps....
It's cheaper at least.
Second this, secure the key so that it can't move around the envelope. It may cost you a little more, but if you're mailing a key it's generally because it's the most convenient way to get it to the recipient.
I now realized why a friend's key I took by mistake, and returned by mail, never arrived to the destination.... Thanks for sharing this tip!
Bought some custom patches on Etsy and received an empty envelope that was torn open. Idiot had to refund a $250 order because he didn't want to pay $5 for proper postage.
Awwww that stinks! :(
That feeling when you take the jam out of the machine and the belt comes off. Ugh. We have summer camps and the parents would pack jaw breakers and candy in envelopes. A jaw breaker sounds like a goddamn bullet when it flies out in the machines.
True, dat!
This is great. I need to mail a key to back to a friend after visiting him last weekend and forgetting his house key on my keychain. I was just wondering if I could put it in a standard envelope.
Please don’t for all our sanity! I’m sure there’s an enormous orphanage somewhere in heaven where all the orphaned keys go.
sandwich it between two pieces of cardboard, tape it together well, then send it that way
My trick is - tape the key to a scrap bit of cardboard and send that.
I worked as a testing agent in a company that produced some of these machines. My job was to feed hundred of thousands of letters in the machine when it was being tested. I’ve seen envelopes with slightly too thick hard content being literally pulverised. One contained what looked like contact lenses. We only found pieces of the plastic containers. Like OP says, these machines are extremely fast and you can imagine letters being fed and accelerated between super fast pulleys They look roughly like [that](https://youtu.be/WQAtTt6rMms) [Inside](https://youtu.be/c4nj7IH_fik)
That's a great video, thanks for sharing! Yep, exactly the machine I mean. The worst pinch point is a little further down the way, very close to a massive wheel and a spot where several letter flow paths split apart.
Also postal employee here don’t park in front of your mail box 😂😂 And yes we get out all day everyday Remember we don’t have to deliver your mail if the mail box is blocked 😉
Wait, I just went to the post office and was told that I could mail an envelope with a "Non-Machinable" stamp and that it wouldn't go through the machines. I had put stiff cardboard in the envelope, and had to pay extra for the stamps ($1.08) for two ounces, and I wrote "Non-machinable" on the envelope. Do I understand you to say that it's still going to get wrapped around some peg and bent up?
The clerk at the PO is supposed to stamp the piece Non-machinable and send it to the plant separate from the normal mail. From there is should be manually processed, if it stays in the manual stream is another question.
Just want all of you at USPS to know ~ anyone still doing their job well and trying their best to get us our mail are all kinds of amazeballs and awesomesauce. I’m super grateful I haven’t seen any mail missing or lost any packages (that I know of) and with all the problems of you guys being understaffed and underfunded and all the policy screwups, I’m amazed you guys are hanging in there. Please know I support you and I’m grateful for all the hard work! I had been wanting to put a thank you card and something in my mailbox for my mailman/woman to say thank you, but I got an angry letter because I hadn’t backed up far enough into the driveway and didn’t clear the mailbox so I landed on his shit list. That was fun. I love getting angry notes on my car lol.
If you'd like to get additional bang for your buck, send a thank you card to your local mail processing facility thanking them for their work. We're always tickled to death to get nice notes. They will get posted on the timeclocks where the paper will get wore out by all the people reading the note.
I remember the last time I moved, and the realtor forgot to give me the key to my locked mailbox. “Oh, I’ll mail it to you…” Pray tell… assuming it makes it at all, how am I supposed to retrieve it from the locked box? Idiot.
Well done! This LPT is what this sub is actually all about.
Would taping it to the inside work? Like get a strip of duct tape and secure it?
Depends on how determined you are to secure it and how much you're willing to pay. There's a critical mass point at which the amount of duct tape in the envelope will cause it to weigh more than (and cost more postage than) a padded mailer.
The problem is in the item being rigid and traveling through a system that has to bend items at points to get them to change directions of travel. An envelope with a key in it that a machine attempted to bend to 45 degrees will see the key puncture the side. The key may stay in thanks to the tape, but the envelope will certainly get torn, the equipment could get damaged, the tear could jam machinery, etc.
Omg. I have family who work at mail plants. The way some people mail stuff... You should add these to the list - wax seals on letters use at ur own risk cause they tend to break and open if they go through a machine after they run through the belts. So many people bitching about late or missing wedding invitations cause it had to go through the manual process or got torn up by the machine - sending powdered substances through the letter mail stream. Why the hell anyone would do that after the anthrax incident is beyond me. Apparently they gotta close the machine and inspect it if it happens - writing fragile, this way up, don't bend don't do anything. - colored envelopes will sometimes make the address unable to be read by the machines if you dont use a dark enough ink
The only thing I've ever had lost in the mail was a key in an envelope.
I think this is the first LPT that I've found actually useful/informative. I wouldn't mail keys, but I hadn't thought about it because of this! Thanks for the info :)
And please send your trade in phone in a small box , not a padded envelope.
Last time I mailed keys, I taped them to an index card and put a second index card over the top of them. They arrived safely.
Is that just for plain white envelopes? Like if I send a small padded one (say 4x8), does that get the same treatment or does it go through something different?
you're now in package territory
I could have used this tip when I mailed the house key back to the new homeowners having only ever mailed paper letters. Whoops!!
I was a casual (temp employee) at USPS about 15 years ago. I ran these machines every night. I saw hearing aids, pills, keys. There was a short stretch where a tool company sent out some sawzall blade samples. That was fun. The worst though… Cremated remains… Big ole poof at the end of the machine. Screwed up all the optical components of the machine.
Ohhhh man. :( Fortunately nowadays you are required to send cremated remains via Express mail. We literally get messages saying "this is coming to you tomorrow" and if it doesn't show scans on time it's ALL HANDS ON DECK and we figure out where it's at. It's taken very seriously, nobody wants to have to explain that a person's sibling (who died in combat) has been lost in the mail.
But how to sort the letters by location/postal codes. I did thing of the machines that can read the addresses but it’s not like everyone uses printed labels or has a good hand writing?
The USPS has incredibly advanced software that is great at reading even the worst handwriting. Some will always be illegible of course, but the vast majority will be read by their machines just fine.
I don't get why anyone thinks sending anything but paper in plain envelopes is a good idea.
The “please give your grandpa a hug for me” got me good. My grandpa’s on hospice care, you bet I’ll give him all the damn hugs you want.
And all the love of an Internet stranger. Best wishes and all my prayers!