Lost Package Derails Project To Preserve Super Nintendo Games (eurogamer.net) 172
A developer's quest to preserve (and validate) every game ROM for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System has hit a glitch -- thanks to the U.S. postal service. Byuu, the creator of the Higan SNES emulator, had been expecting a package with 100 games from the PAL region (covering most of Europe, Africa, South America, and Oceania).
wertigon writes:
As it turns out, someone at the USPS thought it was a good idea to lose the package, thereby robbing the project of roughly $5000 and the sad hopes of ever seeing a full indexing, like the one done to the U.S set. Byuu writes... "I do still want to dump and scan the Japanese games I already purchased. But we will never have a complete PAL set.
Kotaku reports the games were worth up to £8,000, and though Byuu says the sender never requested reimbursement, it's going to happen "because I can't live with myself if it doesn't." He's asking for donations on Patreon, adding "If the package ultimately arrives, I will be refunding all donations."
In that Thursday update, Byuu writes that the post office had finally shipped him the label from the package "and nothing else, claiming the machine ate it." They've launched an investigation, reports Byuu, adding "It's still an incredibly long shot that they'll find anything, but we'll see. I really, really hope that they do."
The machine ate my package (Score:2)
That's up there with "the dog ate my homework".
Or did someone misprogram AIs so they thought "Bytes" were "bites"...
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However, I've also heard of literal high speed box slappers, pneumatic box throwers and even on our systems a box can get "eaten"... though we design our systems to minimize this unlike some others. Thankfully the industry is moving away from that and toward systems like we make or like those Amazon uses (which is solvin
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No matter how much damage, the ROMs are unlikely to be destroyed, which means there's value in delivering the contents no matter what, at least in this case. Of course with that many cartridges in one package, I wouldn't be surprised if some over-eager postal inspector mistakenly believed that somebody was importing pirated game cartridges to sell, in which case the package is probably fully intact in the evidence locker of some law enforcement agency.
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Re: The machine ate my package (Score:1)
Teacher: I'm tired of your excuses. I want your homework on my desk first thing tomorrow morning.
Kid: really sir, are you sure about that?
Teacher: first thing tomorrow morning, no excuses!
Kid:
Stolen for sure (Score:1)
The caliber of people working for the USPS is marginally one step above the DMV or TSA.
Whenever I have to go into the post office, the body language of the employees just *sucks* and I feel like I have interrupted their otherwise important lives by trying to mail a package.
Re: Stolen for sure (Score:1)
deffinetly even a call gets lots of attitude.
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They are a lot nicer in the PO I go to. Maybe you need to change which office you use?
Re: Stolen for sure (Score:2)
Insurance? (Score:1)
How about purchasing an insurance next time you ship a package worth $5000 ?
Haha (Score:3)
Oh that's funny you think the USPS will cut you a check when they lose an insured package?
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Oh that's funny you think the USPS will cut you a check when they lose an insured package?
When I had packages stolen from the post office, the shippers got reimbursed on the insurance. Except for one shipper who shipped a small item in first class mail to save on cost. The post office paid out $15 for an $85 item. That shipper stopped using first class mail no matter how small the item is.
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How do the postal services get away with charging extra for insurance?
Your goods are in their care, you're paying them for a service so why aren't they legally liable for any loss or damage ?
When you take your car in for a service, the garage is responsible if they blow it up. If a builder destroys your house when remodelling, he's responsible.
In both cases they have (or should have) 3rd party liability insurance to make good.
How would you feel if you went to a hospital and the surgeon asked "would you like
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They do- up to a certain dollar amount. If you need more than that, you buy the insurance. At which point you have to declare what's in the package, and how much insurance you want. They then charge for that, because otherwise it would be ripe for abuse to claim every letter you send if worth 10K.
And a surgeon does have insurance against cutting the wrong bits out. Its called malpractice insurance.
Re: Insurance? (Score:5, Interesting)
Won't help. I had the postal service "lose" a $50 package once. They won't deal with the recipient, they'll only talk with the sender. In my case they "delivered" it during a Hold Mail order and I never saw it. They didn't care. Apparently to get my money pack, the sender would have to file a police report!
When I had five packages ($200 in merchandise) stolen from the post office, two from inside and three from the post office box outside, I did the following:
https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov/ [uspis.gov]
The shippers verified my stolen package compliant, filed for insurance reimbursement, and sent out replacement packages. The supervisor who blew me and a dozen customers off when we complained got fired. Exterior cameras were installed to monitor the post office boxes located outside. Package handling inside the post office is no longer anonymous as initials are required for putting a package on the shelf for pick up or in the post office box.
I've also had them "lose" multiple credit cards and various other smaller packages over the years. They don't care. They don't have to. They're government.
Most people find it easier to play the victim game and complain about the government rather than take responsibility and take action..
The dog ate my homework! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's really sad that this happened, but really, sending something irreplaceable, (and arguably culturally important), by POST for Christ's sake, strikes me as irresponsible. I know courier companies lose stuff too, but I highly doubt that the automation equivalent of "the dog ate my homework" would be offered as an explanation. And if the package had been lost by a courier company, I suspect there would a better chance of it being found sooner or later.
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Because a point of a postal service, is to expect mail to arrive.
And it do happen, most of the time.
Simply put: Theft is theft, and if the package is tracked, theft is still theft.
Nintendo inside job (Score:1)
Nintendo makes a NES Classic Edition and a guy wants to preserve games for others to play. Hmmmm...inside job? The damage for cartridge games has already been done, but if you go online to actually find easy to download Nintendo ROMs of any kind right now, it's become very very difficult without going to shady websites.
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The Nintendo NES Classic has 30 games. According to Wikipedia, "There are a total of 713 known licensed game titles of which 679 were released in North America."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Entertainment_System_games [wikipedia.org]
Our machines do that sometimes, unfortunately. (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm not saying it happened here, but many people do not understand that you have to put things in appropriate packaging for the machines to process.
This. I have seen too many things shipped in inappropriate packaging. Just a few months ago, I ordered a $400 replacement board for some equipment, and the company I ordered from took the sub-box (the one made of inferior East Asian cardboard, and meant only to be used to put the item on a shelf), slapped a label on it, and gave it to USPS. Hey, it's a box, right? Just ship it! It arrived very battered, and the mailman basically ding-dong-ditched it (I was expecting it, and by the time I got to the door, he was already back in the truck!) The only thing that saved it was its anti-static bubble-wrap packaging.
I have also received a box crammed into another box with no padding on the sides, when the original box was itself part of the value of the item. It was literally slid into another, slightly larger, box with zero clearance on five sides, then foam peanuts poured into the top nine inches or so. Naturally, the box landed hard and a bottom edge was crushed. Just putting a couple inches of foam peanuts on the bottom would have been enough to save it.
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for a few multi million dollars, they could build machines that don't have to steamroller envelopes.
No, no, no ... the phrasing is supposed to be "we can put a man on the moon, why can't we ...."
If you're going to play armchair engineer, do it right.
Registered Mail (Score:5, Interesting)
This is what Registered Mail is for.
It gives end-to-end point-to-point traceability. At every moment between when the package is handed to the clerk and when it is handed to the recipient, it is either in someone's hands or in a locked storage container. Every time the package changes hands, the new holder has to sign for it.
The US Postal Service HATES it. They try HARD to talk you out of using it. It is a pain in the patootie for them, being forced to do their job properly.
If you ever want to see a postal clerk get a SICK look on his face, tell him "I need to trace a missing Registered Mail piece." He knows, in that instant, that one of his co-workers may be about to lose his nice cushy job, and quite possibly move into a Federal zero-star hotel, the kind with iron bars on the windows and doors.
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You don't want to be sending such packages via postal mail, or even via UPS / FedEx / DHL. Instead, you want to buy the person s
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If you're sending your tax returns on the day of the deadline and want proof you did your part on time, you send it registered mail.
A Certificate of Mailing is adequate for proof as far as the IRS is concerned, and costs a fraction of what they charge for Registered mail.
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I don't know if you can use registered mail for parcels originating in Germany.
But the real fuckup is that it was sent via DHL. It got fucked in the handover from DHL to USPS (the delivery agent) somewhere in New Jersey.
Registered airmail with Deutsche Post, if even possible, would've cost a fortune. But then the box was worth a fortune, so...
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It is possible for smallish packets that weigh under 2 kg. Additional insurance for high value goods is also possible.
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You can send registered mail between most countries these days - many first world ones participate in a worldwide tracking system so you can actually track a package t
Gov Auction (Score:1)
There's always a possibility they'll end up somewhere like govdeals.com where the USPS lists items.
https://www.govdeals.com/index... [govdeals.com]
Someone else said it, but they were too nice (Score:1)
Only a moron would send something irreplaceable via regular mail. Sorry. This is what UPS and FedEx are for. If it's purely domestic within the US, there are services available from the USPS that will do the same thing (priority mail with tracking). It also needs to be in a secure box - thick cardboard and taped up really well.
It's sad that these carts were lost. Consider it another expensive class at the school of hard knocks.
Why wasn't it insured? (Score:3)
If you/re shipping 5K, insure it for at least 5K if not 10K. That allows you to replace it and deal with costs associated with that replacement. If this did anything other than delay the effort, its from sheer incompetence.
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It wasn't insured because the sender is a defrauder of the German welfare system and he isn't allowed to have such expensive items, be it games or gold bars. He had to lie about the package value in the post office and at Bundeszollverwaltung (German Federal Customs Service).
The German dude admitted to it, but byuu tried to hush him because it doesn't look good on his e-begging account on Patreon.
Not just the USPS at fault (Score:4, Insightful)
When you send a package internationally, there are a lot more hands than just the USPS involved.
Shipper. Did they box and package it correctly? Did they understand how durable the package had to be?
Point of origin postal service. In many countries, these operations are corrupt or prone to theft or delays. If the actual value was declared, that is a huge invite.
Point of origin Customs service. Who knows what they may open or inspect or sample. Will they reseal it properly? Who knows.
Shipper. Boat, airline, whatever. They toss it in with all the other mail. Hope it was packed correctly.
Destination country Customs service. They will check it, may open it, inspect it, impose duties or fines, or confiscate it entirely. The item is not released back into the mail until Customs clears it. If they open the box, they are supposed to reseal it properly.
Destination country Postal Service Who knows.
It is sitting at the USPS facility in Jersey City (Score:2)
If you're sending something "worth $5000"... (Score:1)
...then you're a fucking MORON not sending it fedex, and/or insured.
Dipshits.
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I work in the logistics industry and truly, whatever you ship you should ASSUME it's going to be tipped on every side. To go from point A to point B, *generally* you should assume that's going to be handled (loaded/unloaded) at least 6-7 times - from you loading onto local truck, unloaded at local terminal, loaded onto route truck, unloaded at next terminal, loaded onto local truck, delivered at local place.
All handled by people who, even if reasonable, are in a tremendous hurry all the time. Some - for e
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I work in an industry that believes if it's not important enough for YOU to pack correctly and safely, it's not our problem to babysit your stuff.
Sorry, your "super important package" is precisely as important to us as everyone else's.
Fundamental problem with this project... (Score:2)
While I'm sure he'll find plenty of mistakes. There's one kind I don't see mentioned anywhere in this thread.
How is he supposed to KNOW that the bits in the cartridge are correct?
Radiation and high-temperatures still effect ROM memory. Otherwise, why would we need rad-hardened ROM memory on satellites? And what is space? Just a more dangerous version of what we have on Earth--but Earth still has some radiation. Now add DECADES of sitting around absorbing background radiation, with periods of sitting thrown
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How is he supposed to KNOW that the bits in the cartridge are correct?
Radiation and high-temperatures still effect ROM memory. Otherwise, why would we need rad-hardened ROM memory on satellites? And what is space? Just a more dangerous version of what we have on Earth--but Earth still has some radiation. Now add DECADES of sitting around absorbing background radiation, with periods of sitting thrown around on top of someone's table under hot sunlight.
There's a reason super-long-term storage is not as simple as burning a CD.
Now, yes, yes, the practical cure of things like boot loaders, ROM hacks, poor early dumps, and all that crap. Sure. I'm clearly NOT debating that. But tiny artifacts in sprites? Single bit changes in code? Maybe not so much...
Bullshit. You have no idea what you are talking about.
Mass manufactured Carts use mask-programmed ROM devices. Such devices are literally hardwired during fabrication with the bit pattern using a metallization layer. EPROMs are only used for Prototypes because compared to Masked-ROMs they are hideously expensive. Masked ROMs don't lose their bits. The only way to get a bit flip there would be from de-capping the device an physically altering the mask. In ROM failures part of the address decode logi
I don't like the higan dev. (Score:2)
I know i am going to get flack for this, but i don't like him.
When he was the zsnes sound dev, and higan was bsnes he purposefully sabotaged the zsnes alsa sound system by ignoring the dev documents and grabbing the audio hardware directly. When this was put up as a bug he refused to fix it by saying 'switch to oss'.
By that time oss had LONG since been deprecated because the company backing it tried to sell foss's devs hard work on the system as their own as a commercial *nix sound system.
So i consider this
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For all the time I have known him, he has always been able to give a sound technical reason as to why things work as they do.
Suffice to say, there is a reason everyone defaults to PulseAudio, these days, and it's because ALSA is *hard*, with lots of undocumented functionality.
The News Fixes It (Score:2)
I do (Score:5, Informative)
He's doing more than just dumping the ROMs, he's been photographing the carts and scanning the manuals as well as part of his preservation project. He has a custom rig for dumping that knows more about some obscure hardware quirks of how it does addressing to properly map out the ROMs.
But maybe I should let byuu explain [byuu.org]:
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Except for redumping the ones that were corrupt, as you conveniently ignore....
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Byuu has more detailed knowledge of the hardware quirks and is able to get more accurate dumps because he understands how the memory is mapped at a low level. His custom rig has already found several bad dumps that previously thought to be good.
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Maybe you could explain why "how the memory is mapped at a low level" is important when most computers treat memory as a numbered sequence of words and are shielded from how the memory subsystem is physically organized?
Maybe you were still pooping your diapers back in 1990, but some of us are old enough to remember dealing with segment registers and memory banks. You kids today got it easy.
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Super NES address space is far from linear (Score:5, Informative)
The part of the Sega Genesis memory map allocated to the cartridge is a linear sequence of bytes from $000000 to $3FFFFF. The part of the Super NES memory map allocated to the cartridge is not. See my diagram of Super NES address space [nesdev.com].
The 65816 divides its 16 MiB address space into 256 banks, each 64 KiB in size. In order to make certain addressing modes more efficient to use, the Super NES divides up cartridge ROM address space as follows:
The "HiROM" mapping (mode $21 or $31) is a linear sequence of bytes from $C00000 on up. Because of incomplete decoding of the address bus, the second half of each 64 KiB bank is usually mirrored into $808000-$80FFFF, $818000-$81FFFF, $828000-$82FFFF, ..., $BF8000-$BFFFFF. In addition, banks $80-$FD are mirrored into banks $00-$7D, so that the 65816 CPU can find the reset vectors at $00FFE0-$00FFFF (which is mirrored from $80FFE0-$80FFFF). Usually, battery save memory is at $306000-$307FFF, $316000-$317FFF, ..., $3F6000-$3F7FFF.
You might notice that everything in the above skips banks $7E and $7F. That's where the Super NES puts its 128 KiB of RAM, with the first 8 KiB mirrored into banks $00-$3F and $80-$BF. It also mirrors the memory-mapped I/O ports associated with the CPU's memory controller and the Picture Processing Unit (PPU) into banks $00-$3F and $80-$BF. They are made accessible through all these banks so that the same value of the Data Bank Register (DBR), analogous to the Data Segment (DS) register on 8086, can see RAM and ROM at the same time.
The "ExHiROM" mapping (mode $25 or $35) has two linear sequences of bytes: from $C00000 to $DFFFFF and then from $400000 to $5FFFFF, which get mirrored down into the second half of $80-$BF and $00-$1F respectively. Only the largest games, mostly exclusive to Japan such as Tales of Phantasia, use ExHiROM.
The "LoROM" mapping (mode $20 or $30), more common on early games, does not connect A15 out of the system to the ROM. This means it uses only the second half of each bank: $808000-$80FFFF, $818000-$81FFFF, $828000-$82FFFF, ..., $FF8000-$FFFFFF. Banks $C0 through $FF mirror the 32K of data in that bank into both halves of the bank, and banks $00-$6F are a mirror of banks $80-$EF. Usually, battery save memory is somewhere in $700000-$77FFFF.
Cartridges use either slow or fast mask ROM. Modes $20, $21, and $25 are "slow ROM", where the CPU slows down slightly in order to allow use of cheaper 200 ns ROM. Modes $30 and $31 are "fast ROM", which needs 120 ns ROM that was more expensive in the early 1990s. Mode $35 has fast ROM for the $C00000-$FFFFFF region but slow ROM for the $400000-$5FFFFF region.
Slight differences in address decoding in each cartridge lead to differences in which address ranges actually contain mirrored ROM (as opposed to open bus) and which address ranges contain battery-backed RAM. Furthermore, some coprocessors included in cartridges can change this mapping at runtime.
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Why all the mirroring?
Re:Super NES address space is far from linear (Score:4, Informative)
Different aspects of mirroring have different purposes.
Mirroring is the result of incomplete decoding of the address bus. Incomplete decoding saves a gate or two and usually doesn't hurt anything. Shaving pennies off the replication cost of millions of Game Paks could increase profit.
The 65816 requires the reset and interrupt vectors to be available at $00FFE0-$00FFFF in order to start up. If ROM is not mirrored into $00FFE0-$00FFFF, the system will hang at startup.
Only ROM at $808000-$FFFFFF is set up for fast access. The rest of ROM ($008000-$7DFFFF) is hardwired for slow access so that the 65816 can retrieve its reset vector before the memory controller is configured. So programs run memory controller initialization somewhere in $000000-$7DFFFF and then jump to $808000-$FFFFFF once they've initialized the memory controller.
I/O and a portion of RAM are mirrored into $00-$3F and $80-$BF so that the CPU can access a subset of data in ROM, data in RAM, and I/O without having to either change the data bank register or use 24-bit addressing all the time. Unlike the 8086, the 65816 doesn't have "prefixed" instructions that can change which segment is used. Instead, the data bank register must be explicitly reloaded in order to use 16-bit addressing, which is slightly faster than full 24-bit addressing. In addition, several 65816 addressing modes are hardwired to use bank $00, particularly those dealing with the base pointer (D) or stack pointer (S).
See Fullsnes [problemkaputt.de] or Super NES Development Wiki [superfamicom.org] for more information
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Very interesting. Thanks for taking the time to explain.
So much extra complexity to squeeze every last bit of performance out of that old hardware. Nowadays designers/programmers are so wasteful because everything is so fast they don't care.
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Masochism?
Both?
Old joke :
Masochist to Sadist : "Bite me, beat me, fuck me! Come in my arse and tell me you hate me!"
Sadist (with the sneer of a British Butler to an under-gardener's assistant) : "No."
In reality, there was probably a set of reasons more like
(1) we've decided to use these chips because they're cheap and promised to be available for shipping in 8 weeks ; here are prototypes.
(2) Software Div. needs to write this sort of data in 32bit words and read this in 64bit words. So we'll d
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Furthermore, some coprocessors included in cartridges can change this mapping at runtime.
^^^ I guess this is the real problem I was looking for. Thank you!
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> Then again I really can't see how dumps could screw this up
Some dumpers added logos and other crap, others added trainers. Some just plain got a bad dump and screwed up some graphics which may or may not have any major impact on the game. Really, there are lots of stupid things that can go wrong. In the post I linked earlier, byuu describes some of the bad dumps he found.
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Byuu has more detailed knowledge of the hardware quirks and is able to get more accurate dumps because he understands how the memory is mapped at a low level. His custom rig has already found several bad dumps that previously thought to be good.
And yet...he was okay with these being shipped by US Postal Service? I guess intelligence, experience and common sense can be compartmentalized.
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Missing the point. This is a preservation effort, not a piracy effort.
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Not that easy, some ROMs straight don't exist except in some display or sales-pitch cartridges.
And yes, as you can imagine, they command insane prices. Collectors are kinda nuts that way. There are generally 3 kinds of games that are rare and hence valuable: Those that only exist in low number because they were just produced for events or to pitch them to investors (e.g. Nintendo World Championships), those that were produced so late that nobody gave half a shit about NES games anymore (e.g. Little Samson)
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You might want to do some research. For whatever reason, theft by USPS workers is far more prevalent than 10 or 20 years ago. It is particularly bad among people who are coin collectors and ship coins using USPS.
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Working for the USPS is a shit job, it doesn't pay much, you have to piss in a cup and take an exam and wait around for ages to find out if you've got a job so the most desirable people get offered some other job and subsequently take it while the USPS is still trying to figure out where the application is. So they apparently just hire whoever actually takes the time to go through the process and you end up with a bunch of dingleberries. They still don't have anything clever like automatic detection of rout
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Also, people with military service are given preference for USPS jobs, so they get a lot of misfits that washed out of the service. Many of these people are bitter because they got screwed out of their military pension, and are now stuck in a dead-end job, sorting packages with minimal human interaction. Combine that with knowledge of weapons, and years of training that violence is the solution to most problems, and you can see why "going postal" [wikipedia.org] is so frequent.
Re: Oh for Pete's Sake! (Score:1)
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It's not just USPS that's gone downhill, either. California Overnight used to be super fantabulous. Now Amazon is using them and it's nothing but complaints. ...
At one of my previous apartments, my local UPS guy was awful (I'd be home, and see him walk over with a filled out slip saying I wasn't there, stick it on my door, and leave... without ever touching my package or knocking on my door). However, my local USPS guy was awesome.
At my current apartment, the situation is reversed. My USPS mail person routinely delivers all mail for the building to one of the 3 mail boxes, shoving it all in there. It often includes mail for neighbors, and even some completely rando
Re:Oh for Pete's Sake! (Score:4)
You need to stop pissing other people off.
How do I square that with expecting people to do at least the minimum? Should I just lower my standards so far that I suck their fucking cocks just for showing up at work and giving me bitch face? These people are grade "A" fuckups. And here's the thing, I'm more than willing to help. When the weird-ass prior mail carrier chick's classic Willys broke down, I was the only guy to stop and see if she needed help. I am polite, I smile, I say please and thank you. I do all the same shit that most of these fuckups don't bother to do. I get along great with the one postal employee who actually does her job with grace if not a smile (personally I think smiling is part of a customer service job, but I realize that people have shit days and so I don't care much) but if I rub some of them the wrong way by having some basic standards then that's just going to fucking happen.
I piss people off just by virtue of existing. I'm a gigantic part-Mexican with liberal attitudes who drives a German car in a redneck backwater full of hicks in sticks. And I do not go around telling people how backwards their ideas are, no matter how dumb I think they are. That's not my job and they don't give a shit. I treat people with more respect than they show me, and if they're not satisfied with the level of treatment they're receiving, then they can give a little more or they can fuck right off.
I stop and pick up hitchers, I stop and ask people if they're doing OK and I'll go back and get my tools and come back for them if they need me to. But I also expect people to know how to drive and keep to their side of the road and in general do their fucking job. If that's too high an expectation for you, you know where the door is.
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That is most likely true.
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It was insured, but for only about $1,000. The carrier would not let Byuu's friend insure it for the full value.
Re: Oh for Pete's Sake! (Score:2)
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byuu is lying. It wasn't insured properly because the German sender is a welfare defrauder and he can't admit to the government that he owns so many expensive video games. He had to lie they are worth 1000 EUR because the welfare agency would raise a red flag if had more than 1000 EUR worth of video games.
When people caught byuu on this, he added this info to his Patreon page, but on the very end and worded in a way that tries to play on people's emotions by portraying the German defrauder as a poor guy who
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It was shipped from Europe, so it was handed off to the USPS when it entered the US. The postal service may only allow up to $1,000 in insurance.
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Have you ever heard of anyone collecting on the insurance from USPS?
Yeah, including some in this very story, along with detailed advice on how to get them to pay.
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They do but their tracking system is about 20 years behind what competitors can do.
And if this was an international package, then the tracking data is first entered by the origin postal system and they have to properly hand off that data to the USPS or else it won't even show up in the US system. International tracking numbers also greatly increase the odds of wrong results or weird status updates.
In any case, a package this valuable should have been shipped another way. If it was PAL,probably DHL would b
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Look at the pictures from the reddit thread, buddy shipped a package wrapped in brown paper.
http://i.imgur.com/kLxZo0Z.jpg [imgur.com]
It was probably sheared off in a sorting machine, and nobody has yet to give a shit about some label-less package sitting around.
Re:Oh for Pete's Sake! (Score:4, Interesting)
This doesn't happen with FedEx or UPS. Something might be stolen off the front porch, but packages aren't sliced into routinely. Real companies have real tracking and cameras all over the place to keep fraudulent employees in check. Their investigations are actually investigations.
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There will be always thieves in the system.
As others said, I understand packaging all together to save costs, however it also attracted some unwanted attention.
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I'm not saying stuff doesn't get stolen by employees. but that's not the delivery service "seeing fit" to lose anything.
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He got the package label, which is very suspicious.
"machine ate it" is b.s., but not because machines don't damage or tear packages, but rather because the contents, even damaged, didn't arrive. They will reseal a package, or even rebox it if they have to, so if only the label arrived, it's a pretty clear indication that someone decided to take the contents for walkies.
In the military a frien
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I was living abroad once and a family member sent me a care package. A box of food, inside which they had put a card. I guess they originally had planned to just mail the card, because it was in its own envelope and addressed, though it did not have a stamp. When they decided to send a package, they put together the package, slipped the card/envelope inside, and sent it all.
A couple months later, I went to the local post office and was handed the envelope. Addressed, but no stamp. Someone in the post o
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Spent the entire layover dealing with the red tape over the lost luggage.
Had reports of it in various places, all of which were later denied.
My aunt who lived in another state and had never been mentioned got called to come to the airport and pick it up for me. She gets their, and they deny everything.
This w
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take your meds.
Re: not too smart (Score:2)