Wordless Wednesday
Author Archives: Dick
Mail Order
Both North and South Puffin are somewhere beyond the end of the rainbow so instant gratification is more than a little difficult here. When I was a child, my family would literally mail an order form to a company like Sears and they would send a box of goodies by parcel post the day after the order reached them.
Mail call was always like Christmas around the Harper household and planning was important because it generally took a few days for the (first class) letter to get to the vendor and more than a week for the package to get back.
Today, we click a button on a website and a fulfillment house somewhere generates a label for same day or next day delivery but the principle is the same.
And some of us still call it mail-order. Heck, I usually counsel clients to ship via the US Post Office. It’s easy, it’s cheap, and it gets there on time, I tell them. In fact, I shipped a box by parcel post to a business up north on Friday. It was in their PO Box this morning.
Confession: I take drugs.
These days, of course, most people my age do. We take anti-cholesterol meds and anti-arthritis meds and blood pressure meds and anti-anxiety meds and anti-dizziness meds and anti-gout meds and antihistamines. We take drugs to combat osteoporosis and respiratory difficulty and heart attacks and sudden bladder symptoms. Then we take diuretics to help us pee. After all that, we really do need the antidepressants.
Anyway, our insurance companies train us all to buy by mail order to save us money and time.
I do.
I ordered my usual 90-day refill from the Humana Pharmacy in Phoenix on December 4, 2015.
12/7 email
Your Humana Pharmacy Order Has Shipped!
Order Number 120128889
Estimated Shipping Time: 3-5 days
Click on “Tracking id” under your order information.
Humana sends its mail order drugs by US Mail. They drop the bottle(s) in a thin, gray plastic pouch and send it off into the night from the Phoenix PO.
I clicked the tracking link.
Humana sent the “preshipment info” to the US Postal Service the same time they sent me the email notification. The next thing I know, the package is in Essex, Vermont, just three days later. Nobody, least of all USPS, knows how it got there from Arizona.
Pretty good, eh?
Except it was supposed to be shipped to South Puffin, not North Puffin.
12/11 Tracking Page
Available for Pickup, North Puffin VT12/11 Tracking Page
Forwarded, North Puffin VT12/18 Tracking Page
Arrived at USPS Facility, Brockton MA12/18 email
Your Humana Pharmacy order is on hold.
Our pharmacy team has contacted your doctor to get the information that we need.
Order Number 120128889
Order Status On Hold
From Massachusetts, the package went to Jacksonville and back to Springfield, MA.
12/27 Tracking Page
Departed USPS Destination Facility, Springfield MA12/27 email
Your Humana Pharmacy order is on hold.
Our pharmacy team has contacted your doctor to get the information that we need.
Order Number 120128889
Order Status On Hold
Destination Facility? It was on its way back to North Puffin.
12/28 Tracking Page
Forwarded, North Puffin VT12/29 email
Your Humana Pharmacy order is on hold.
Our pharmacy team has contacted your doctor to get the information that we need.
Order Number 120128889
Order Status On Hold
That was the last email from Humana which still may think they haven’t heard from my doc. It was also the last we heard from USPS for a while.
They did turn up ten days later. The USPS tracking page reported they “arrived at our USPS facility in JERSEY CITY, NJ 07097 on January 7, 2016 at 8:54 am. The item is currently in transit to the destination.”
Unbelievable. Jersey City is *never* in the routing from North Puffin to Springfield MA to Jax to here. Humana shipped December 7. Humana, btw, keeps emailing “Your Humana Pharmacy order is on hold.”
My drugs went to Phoenix.
Phoenix?
Really? Phoenix?
When they arrived at the “facility” in Phoenix, I called my friend Liz Arden who lives out there somewhere. She promised to look for them. No joy. Meanwhile, I used the “Contact us” link on the tracking page to send them this nastygram:
“USPS has forwarded this package
everywhere except to me. The
package contains prescription
medication that is now almost
a month overdue.
USPS needs to find it and get it
here by January 15, 2016 even
if you have to send it by FedEx.”
On January 16, my drugs were in California and I had not heard from USPS.
I hope they really are the drugs I ordered.
Philadelphia on January 18! It will be interesting to see if the drugs turn north or south; odds on they’re headed for North Puffin again. On the other hand, the postmaster in Marathon called and left a message. She had gotten my nastygram from the website. She didn’t leave a phone number, though. I tried to call back at the phone number given on USPS.com (and at 1-800-Ask-USPS) but the number has been disconnected. Except when it’s busy.
The tracking page said my drugs were still in Philly on January 20 but I did finally reach the Marathon Post Office. A nice rep there said she would send a slip to a supervisor. She also suggested I call USPS customer service.
After 33 minutes on hold at the 1-800-CallUSPS number, the lovely Sammy came on the line. Sammy sounded Chinese which made me wonder. We do know USPS outsources a lot of functions, particularly truck transportation of mail, so I figured it’s possible. I found lots of tin hat sites saying that USPS outsources their call center but no real evidence. One fellow posted this:
“So here’s the deal – I called the USPS to get information on a lost package I had shipped. After 20 minutes of miscommunication, on both ends, I asked, ‘Are you working in India?’
“Response – ‘Yes.'”
“For shits and giggles, I called 1-800-ASK-USPS a few hours later. Had a brief conversation about the tracking of the same package. The accent prompted me to ask, in a pleasant voice… ‘What country are you working out of today?’
“Response – ‘China’.”
Anywho, Sammy promised to have a supervisor find my package, take it out of the forwarding system, and manually send it to me. Yeah, you’re right. That didn’t happen either.
The post office (eCustomerCare National @ usps.gov) emailed me January 23 and apologized for “the inconvenience that you have experienced in regards to the delivery of your package.” The tracking page had had no updates since the drugs arrived in Philly. eCustomerCare National suggested I ask Humana to send a replacement order.
1/28 Tracking Page
Arrived at Post Office, North Puffin VT1/28 Tracking Page
Forwarded, North Puffin VT
The North Puffin Post Office received the drugs and forwarded them before I knew they had left Philly.
<SMH>
Still, when I called, the clerk there said she’d find them on the truck. She called the Swanton PO to divert them, tracked them down on the truck, had the driver hand the package to a clerk in the Swanton PO. The Swanton clerk had prepared a Priority Mail box so she dropped the bag of drugs in the new box and sent it. They departed the Swanton Post Office at 3:18 pm. The North Puffin clerk called me back with the tracking number. Expected Delivery Day is Monday, February 1, 2016.
January 28. The cool news of the day is that, 52 days after Humana shipped them, a human bean found my drugs put them in a new box, and sent them by airplane.
January 29. According to USPS.com, my drugs arrived in Nashua this morning … and stayed there. USPS.com isn’t very good at updates.
“USPS is definitely not good at updates and communication,” Miz Arden said. “I rarely get information about USPS-based shipments, except those via Amazon or similar company that will themselves track the package and provide the updates. Sometimes USPS provides an update (I suspect the company who shipped with them worked that out with them), but it’s usually the day they ship, and then the day after the carrier placed it in your parcel box.”
They seem willing to tell us when things arrive at (some) entry points but seem to have no idea of departures and waypoints.
This package started in Phoenix, AZ. It went to North Puffin three times, to Florida twice, back to Phoenix, and surfed in California once before winding up in South Puffin after 54 days. You should see all its passport stamps!
January 30. My drugs arrived! A day ahead of schedule and 54 days after they shipped. And all it took was a real person who put her hands on the package to rip it out of the forwarding system. The thin, gray plastic pouch inside the Priority Mail box looked like it had been ravaged by wolves. And I have no idea what Humana was talking to my doctor about.
At least we now know how to get a package from Phoenix to South Puffin, now. It has to go by way of the Ozarks.
Lies, Damn Lies, and Advertising
“Prices are down down down at Winn-Dixie,” the commercial says, proudly hawking their own Hickory Sweet Bacon cut from $5/pound to just $4/pound.
Wow.
So am I the only one who remembers when Hickory Sweet Bacon was .99/pound on sale?
Wordless Wednesday
Bzzzzzzzz
It was anything but an average night in South Puffin. The temp dropped almost to 50°F. I woke in the dark and didn’t want to get up because it was c-o-l-d in that room. Actually c-o-l-d in this whole house. I did get up eventually because the alarm sounded like robot bees.
That’s unexpected because I should wake to oldies music or, at worst, commercials, one after another.
I used to have a wonderful GE clock radio on my bedside table. Super-Heterodyne receiver. Direct entry keypad for time and radio tuning. “Woodgrain” finish. Gradu-wake. Two alarms, each with completely separate controls so I could set one to turn on the radio and the other the alarm buzzer. And did I mention direct entry? None of this tap-and-hold-and-hope-you-don’t-speed-past-the-time setting.
It died, darn it.
Now I have two alarm clocks by my bed, one set to turn on a gentle radio, the other to wake me with the alarm. Two separate appliances to do what one did. Two separate appliances with the same Stone Age controls my 1970s GE replaced.
Anyway, robot bees.
South Puffin is over the horizon from pretty much everywhere so we have no over-the-air broadcast TV and our few FM radio stations are the ones with antennas right here on the island chain. I generally tune to an oldies station (it’s The Mix for anyone who cares) with its antenna on Survivor Island, the island known on maps as Boot Key. There is no bridge to Boot Key any more, so when the station goes out, someone has to swim the channel.
That happens with some frequency.
Still, this morning, the station was playing; it was my antenna that screwed the pooch. I reached out to the power cord from under the blankets and the mad bees faded into the Crests singing 16 Candles.
Cold out there, so I pulled my hand back. The bees returned.
I’m thinking the mad bees are electronic noise.
I put my hand on the cord again. “Sixteen candles in my heart will glow…”
Back under the covers. Bzzzzzzzzz.
Radio Bob tells us that Most clock/table radios use the power cord as an antenna although an iPod with an FM radio uses its headphone cord as the antenna! I don’t know how the radio chip in cellphones works. FM radio waves travel line-of-sight, meaning more-or-less in straight lines. Objects that get between the transmitter and receiver weaken them.
The antenna is me.
This is not a new phenomenon; I’ve always been able to affect radios although it doesn’t always happen. I do it to the stereo in my North Puffin study. I do it to the living room A/V system here. I’ve done it at Rufus’ and Lee Bruhl’s and Fanny Guay’s. Even Liz Arden noticed it once.
Ms. Arden and I talked about it this morning. She’s an Electrical Engineer so I figured she’d know. She thinks it may be impedance matching.
Huh?
“Hmm,” she said. “You need a broadcast engineer or RF guy.”
Radio Bob says there are plenty of sources of interference like ham radio operators, computers, TVs, fluorescent lights, and electric fences. The hams have been quiet. I hadn’t started the computers, TVs, or twisty fluorescents (I was still in bed, remember?). And South Puffin ordinances forbid electric fences.
Radio Bob says Get a better antenna or a better location for it. Or move me to a different room.
In our next episode, Liz Arden asks why she turns off streetlights when she drives by.
Really. I’ve seen it happen. She can drive along in her motorized roller skate and a streetlight will go out as she passes only to come back on again a minute or so later. It’s happened often enough not to be coincidence.
I think it’s her Cerulean aura, but I’m open to other theories.