Late Wednesday May 29th, I ordered a water filter to be shipped to my friend’s in Virginia. I have an Amazon Prime membership, so the package got there on Friday May 31st, within the two promised business days. My friend promptly checked the order to make sure everything was there, repackaged it, and sent it ‘Express Mail’, which offers delivery to most major international markets within three to five business days.

She had me pay her the $30 or so it would have cost to send the package a slower route and covered the difference for Express herself (THANK YOU, I love you!), only telling me this after the package was processed.

The package left Norfolk on Monday and got stuck in Canadian Customs. It’s always scary to see the ‘item was sent for further processing’ and then ‘item was released from customs’ notes. This was Wednesday. No update yesterday. As far as I knew, the package was languishing in Mississauga.

I checked the status this morning and discovered that it had arrived in Regina at 1AM and left there at 4AM!

I went to the post office around 10, just as the post master was getting into her car, and when she saw me, she got out and told me she had a package for me. My filter was here! AND I didn’t have to pay any taxes on it! So my out of pocket cost was only about $30. Wooho!

This isn’t the first time I’ve been impressed by the expediency of the postal system, but this really was above and beyond what I expected, especially since my friend sent me another package by a slower method and it seemed to be moving along faster.

In other news, Skynet has gained self-awareness AND is prescient. I got up this morning and had crazy fast internet with three bars of signal and an RSSI of -86. At the EXACT minute I hit send on an email to a client, the connection dropped and would not come back. I had to scramble to get out the door and up the hill for my deadline. Once up there, I got offered tons of work for the weekend, which meant enough downloads that I would have had to go up the hill even if I had been able to send an email from home. Be very afraid people.

I don’t expect to be back online till Monday as I have 30 hours of work to do by 9PM Sunday. Gary, have a virtual beer for me each evening!