{"id":66,"date":"2007-02-13T16:37:36","date_gmt":"2007-02-13T15:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/?p=66"},"modified":"2010-09-19T10:23:13","modified_gmt":"2010-09-19T16:23:13","slug":"special-delivery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/special-delivery\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Special’ delivery"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s an episode of The Simpsons<\/em> where Mr. Burns wants to send\u00c2\u00a0an express\u00c2\u00a0package to someone.\u00c2\u00a0 It rapidly goes through several handlers (in a parody of a FedEx or DHL advert – I forget which) before being given to Homer to deliver.\u00c2\u00a0 Homer sees Mr. Burns’s name on it, and not realizing that this is the ‘From’ person, rushes, panting into Mr. Burns’ office to deliver it to him, some 30 seconds after Mr. Burns sent it in the first place.\u00c2\u00a0 Classic stuff. But sadly all too real…<\/p>\n

I’ve just relocated my office from Brussels (Belgium) to Houston, Texas.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I packed up my 13 years’ worth of assorted crap into four large boxes and asked my Admin Assistant to ship them on to me at some stage, “no rush”.\u00c2\u00a0 There were a handful of documents that I needed more urgently and didn’t want to blow my luggage allowance (or back) on, so I asked her to send them express, via courier.\u00c2\u00a0 When I subsequently arrived in Houston (after a week’s diversion to Fairfax, VA, to teach a course),\u00c2\u00a0my boxes had miraculously arrived, but the express package was nowhere to be seen.<\/p>\n

After a bit of tracking down, I found out what had hapened to it.\u00c2\u00a0 It had been sent from Brussels without issue, but when it got to the company mailroom in Houston, mailboy Billy-Bob Dipshit Jr. decided against actually delivering it to the exact office specified\u00c2\u00a0on the\u00c2\u00a0envelope, but instead checked for my office location in the company directory.\u00c2\u00a0 As I hadn’t gotten around to updating this yet (as I was ‘in transit’) this still referred to my office in Brussels.\u00c2\u00a0 So what did he do?\u00c2\u00a0 That’s right – mailed it\u00c2\u00a0straight back to my old office in\u00c2\u00a0Brussels.\u00c2\u00a0 Even though this was clearly already the ‘From’ address…<\/p>\n

So I had to have my Admin Assistant on Brussels go round and pick it up from my old desk (where the Brussels mailroom had efficiently put it) and send it straight back again.\u00c2\u00a0 This time I’ve updated my address in the directory, just in case Billy-Bob has another one of his brainwaves.\u00c2\u00a0 Special delivery?\u00c2\u00a0 Yeah, like special needs <\/em>special…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Mr. Burns wants to send\u00c2\u00a0an express\u00c2\u00a0package to someone.\u00c2\u00a0 It rapidly goes through several handlers (in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[56,24],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-postal-service","tag-stupidity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":247,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions\/247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}