[Milsurplus] [ARC5] OT: UPS Ground Insanity

[Jim Haynes]

One of my friends in Eugene OR ordered some connectors from a supplier
in Seattle.  Using UPS tracking he watched them go from Seattle to
Portland to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Flagstaff to Albuquerque
to Salt Lake City...and eventually back to Seattle.  Meanwhile the
supplier had sent him another set that arrived promptly.

Back in the 1960s when General Electric was in the computer business
they had contracted with some railroad to build a rail car tracking
system.  There were stories told of the G.E. guys going to the rail
yard to study the problem.  In the back of some rail yard they found
a whole carload of new 1950s-ish cars that had never made it to the
dealers.  And there was another story about a carload of hides that
had been shipped back and forth between two cities over and over for
several months.