In which the package keeps getting closer, but never actually arrives... Last Saturday I bought a small lot on eBay. It shipped Monday the 12th (from my old hometown in Maryland, oddly enough). It left Maryland shortly after midnight the morning of the 13th, and arrived at the regional facility in Raleigh before 8AM. "Oh boy", I thought, "I might get it today!" Nope. The next day (the 14th), at about 1 in the afternoon, it showed up as "in transit to destination" (my town, maybe 20 miles over from Raleigh). Fine, whatever -- normally it would've been at my door by then, but these things happen. This morning (the 15th), the tracking showed "Departed USPS Regional Destination Facility" (Raleigh again)! I've been spoiled by the USPS -- normally, even a package from California would've arrived by now. But there's one coin I really want to examine close-up in this lot, and it's maddening to watch the PO play keep-away with it...
If it makes you feel any better, I had shipped a Christmas card to Italy for my family there. It went from NJ to NY, to CA, back to NY and now is lost somewhere between NY and CA. Last tracked December 23rd. Maybe it'll make it there by next Christmas? You are definitely not the only one with USPS troubles, I've had my fair share of small scale "almost there, come on ol' Betsy" experiences! Best of luck, hopefully it comes in soon!
Like I said, normally they're stars -- much more reliable in my experience than UPS, at least around here. That's why it's a mini-rant, and isolated.
I just sent a package from SLC, Utah to a guy outside of Dallas, Texas. Guess where they sent it? Boise, Idaho. So they are sending it North-West instead of South-East.
Well, this morning, it's back in my town. Not marked "Out for delivery" yet, though, so I won't be counting my packages before they're delivered.
Some of them really do like to go on a road trip on the way. The ones I've always found to be the slowest or end up with the most problems are those ones like yours that are just going a couple states and may take who knows what route. I had one in PA go from Philly to the town it was supposed to be in back and fourth four times before the town delivered it. It was like they didn't realize the address was there. Coast to coast generally seems to avoid that.
I once spent a week watching my package bounce around different parts of Puerto Rico - on its way from Illinois to Texas. It did finally arrive at our PO box.
I found to my surprise that there are a bunch of Zeno's paradoxes. I thought it was the "half the distance each time" tale, but apparently the more famous ones are Achilles-vs-tortoise and "dichotomy" (before you can cover a whole distance, you have to cover half of it, but before you can do that, you have to cover a quarter, etc, etc). Apparently it takes calculus to refute them rigorously, but I always thought they fell to common sense.
The package did arrive today, and I can see why it was delayed. The seller printed a regular eBay mailing label, put it onto a padded envelope -- then folded the whole thing in half and taped it, so that the return address and square code were on one side, and my address and the bar code were on the other side. I probably just had to wait for both sides to get scanned at both post offices. Oh, and the one coin? A 1934-S Peace dollar that probably won't make AU, and may be ungradeable due to a few very heavy hairlines or very light scratches on each face. The others are quite crusty and lustrous, but dirt-common dates. That's almost always the way; if it were easy to find the rare ones, they wouldn't be rare, nor worth chasing...
