Strange Mail Stories
County residents send some bizarre things by post.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
It’s often the first thing visible when walking into a packing and shipping store like UPS: “WE DO NOT ACCEPT” followed by this list of items – live animals, fire arms, compressed gas, flammable material, explosive and radioactive material. After talking with a number of local shipping and postal employees, the Weekly has discovered that county residents have almost always followed these rules – excluding one person who tried to mail a dog through the Seaside Post Office. But the Weekly also discovered that locals have often broken the rules for normality, practicality and good taste.
One customer tried to ship a single slice of lemon cake across the country. “I thought it was a gag gift when she asked me how she should package it,” says a postal worker who, like the other postal workers the Weekly spoke to, requested anonymity at the behest of company policy. “I doubt it made it whole.”
“People take sending items via mail to large degrees,” says another shipping clerk. “A man brought in a 148-pound used and greasy motor and wanted it sent across the country. He should have cleaned it before attempting to send it. The grease combined with the extreme weight made it was quite the endeavor.”
Another postal worker reports a lighter, but more awkward, packaging situation. “I was shocked when the young lady gave me dirty panties to send,” she says. “I thought it must have been an important piece of underwear to send so far.”
Unsurprisingly, the Weekly’s research yielded some helpful tips, including this: Shipping a wedding gift is a good idea; shipping a wedding cake might not be the best bet. “A mother tried to post a wedding cake once,” one shipper says. “After suggesting this might not be the greatest idea she convinced me to separate it into parts and send it anyways.”
The shipper did suggest insurance.
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