Shipping from Europe to USA

[Norman Jaffe]

I had an interesting experience with UPS - they shipped me a tape library from the U.S. to Canada... when it arrived, the inside was completely trashed. 
As in, no recognizable components bigger than a credit card. 
UPS insisted that the condition of the tape library was as they received it for shipment. 
Until I sent them a photograph of the puncture mark made by THEIR forklift, right through THEIR shipping documents... 

From: "cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> 
To: "cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> 
Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2019 12:21:39 PM 
Subject: Re: Shipping from Europe to USA 

> On Aug 22, 2019, at 2:09 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: 
> 
> 
> 
>> On Aug 22, 2019, at 2:57 PM, Peter Corlett via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: 
>> 
>> On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 06:30:10PM +0000, Henk Gooijen via cctalk wrote: 
>> ... 
>>> Only UPS did … and yes, the “horror” stories *are* true. They managed to drop 
>>> the package. Not from 4 inches above ground, but more, because a *steel 
>>> corner* had a dent! 
>> 
>> Hence that old joke: "If being air dropped out of a C-130 into a minefield 
>> constitutes 'moderately rough handling', what constitutes 'very rough 
>> handling'?" "Being shipped UPS". 
> 
> I'm reminded of a legendary story from a long time ago, of a DEC disk being air-shipped to a customer. RP03? Not sure, but something of that size class. 
> 
> The story was that the shipping company hadn't strapped it down properly, so when the plane applied takeoff power, the drive slid backwards in the cargo hold. Fast enough to exit the hold through the airplane skin, landing on the runway with a nice bounce. 
> 
> The drive was taken back to Maynard, where it was observed that the corner of the frame was badly bent. The techs propped it up on a cinder block and turned the drive on; it worked fine. 
> 
> Sure sounds like a fairy tale, but it's a fun one. 

Friend who owned a larger regional ISP back in the day bought a new Ascend MAX. It shipped UPS and arrived with a perfect boot print on the side of the box. To this day we still make jokes about UPS playing soccer with the package. 

(Semi-related side story; A few months after installation, the Max started dropping calls on one line card. Ascend refused to RMA it because it passed diagnostics. They went back and forth over for a week or so until one day their sysadmin had enough; He calmly removed the card from the chassis and, with an Ascend tech on speakerphone, smashed the thing to bits with a hammer. “Oh, it just failed. Won’t pass diagnostics anymore.” He got his RMA number. The replacement card worked without issue for the next several years.)