Shipping equipment (was: Re: Prepare to chuckle...)

--- Doc Shipley <doc at mdrconsult.com> wrote: wrote: stuff that look they're A couple years ago, I bought a Heath/Zenith Z-19 terminal from eBay. I was in my house one day, and heard a loud >WHAM!< from the front door. Investigating, I found a large cardboard box on the porch, and a mark in the dust on the door where the box had hit it. They must have thrown the box to get it to hit the door like that, and make that much noise. The box was a thick walled computer monitor box, originally from a 17" ViewSonic. Inside, the terminal was very well packaged, with that stiff form-fitting instant foam-in-a-bag stuff (no, I don't know what it's called...) The terminal was intact externally, however some of the heavier parts had broken free inside. After a bit of cleaning, it worked fine. I still need to glue some of those internal mounting posts back on... With the treatment that UPS seems to give it's packages, I'm amazed that any gear ever arrives functional! On a side note, I once worked someplace where we dealt with computer equipment coming off lease. We basically handled the recovery and resale of it. We would ship out empty boxes full of packing material, complete with shipping labels for the return shipment. Customers would receive the box, pack the equipment with the supplied foam, and return it. Simple, right? For computer monitors, we shipped out large 20x20x20 boxes. Inside was enough foam packing material to fill the box - without the monitor inside. It was resiliant, soft foam, in chunks and sheete. Probably not the best packing material in the world, but decent. I think maybe 75% of the monitors were not useable by the time they got back to us. In most cases, they were just poorly packed. Which doesn't seem possible considering we supplied plenty of material to pack them in. Some arrived with the monitor simply tossed into the box, with no effort made to put the packing material around it. (Screen up, shoved in). Others came back with almost no packing material at all - even though the box was full when it left. Other boxes arrived with the monitor, screen against the bottom of the box, foam thrown on top of it. Shattered monitor housings, broken picture tubes, we got it all. The ones that survived were packed properly - monitor wrapped in the supplied plastic bag, with foam on all sides, wedged securely into the box with the monitor in the center. Also, with companies that were returning a lot of equipment, we would send individual boxes for everything - even laptops. Laptop boxes were smaller, sturdier, and included plenty of foam as well. Since the machines were being returned with their carrying case most of the time, they survived fine, regardless of packing. But, we also got things back "combined" into the monitor box or PC box. Laptops crushed by the 17" monitor they were mispackaged with. Two PC's crammed into a box intended for one, etc. No amount of instructions and supplied materials are enough for some people. -Ian