January 18, 2005

Direct Creative conducted an experiment of sending various items through the mail. Jeff Van Bueren writes up the results on their Web site. (via BoingBoing)

"We sent a variety of unpackaged items to U.S. destinations, appropriately stamped for weight and size, as well as a few items packaged as noted. We sent items that loosely fit into the following general categories: valuable, sentimental, unwieldy, pointless, potentially suspicious, and disgusting."

posted by Sooooz 19 years ago
  • "The USPS appears to have some collective sense of humor, and might in fact here be displaying the rudiments of organic bureaucratic intelligence." Wonderful.
  • I think this is a double post, but god, did this make me laugh the first time I saw it. Sometimes we don't give the USPS enough credit.
  • Oh this is a fantastic experiment testing the bounds of acceptable work dedication. Most postal workers I've had as friends in the past and current all seem to have excellent senses of humor. Viva la poste!
  • My favorite was the bottle of spring water.
  • Is it a double post? I searched and searched and came up empty.
  • A friend of mine once walked across the United States (this was in the early 80s, I think) and as his sneakers wore out he wrote letters on them, addressed them and mailed them. Worked fine but then years later when we tried mailing shoes, they all came back with notes saying: Must be wrapped, don't try this again. Sigh.
  • What Johnny Hazard said. I lived with a postal carrier for a couple of years and he always said that postal-types had to have good sense of humors (good senses of humor? good senses of humors? whatever). It think it has something to do with fending off the mundane and repitious nature of the job (plus having to get up at o'dark thirty every morning to sort the mail). That being said, my postal pal drank like hyper greyhound on a July day. Must be something to that, too.
  • This experiment was done by AIR years ago. This looks like the same article just reprinted by author at a new URL. The original can be found at http://www.improb.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i4/postal-6-4.html good stuff, all of it.
  • Nice! A cousin of mine is a mail carrier, and he does have a pretty good sense of humor. I wonder how this experiment would differ now, with all the post 9/11 paranoia?