Mail Fail--America Has Let Me Down.

Today, America has failed me. Our ingenuity and our freedom combine in wonderful ways, and that includes the mail. I've always heard "you can put just about anything in the mail if it's got the right postage on it." Once upon a time you could mail Wired Magazine strange things and they'd put it in the magazine. Well, the postal service let me down today, and I didn't even try to mail anything bizarre.

Apparently, mailing memory sticks (flash drives) and other objects in standard letter envelopes is a bad deal, though my situation isn't just that.

I mailed my buddy at Complicated System of Pulleys his memory stick that he lent to me. I put it in an envelop, with a random piece of paper folded like a letter, with the stick inside the paper's folds. There are various places on the internet that tell you not to do this, but I read those today, not last week when I mailed this. I read those today because today, my envelope showed up in my mailbox.



The envelope was returned to me without the flash drive, and with a hole in the side of the envelope. Could a sorter machine have compressed the envelope and forced the stick to pop out the side of the envelope? Hmm. But also, I got the envelope back. Why, you ask? Well, I'm not sure.



So guys, use padded envelopes to mail memory sticks, flash drives, or engagement rings. They are, apparently, sorted by hand and not subject to crushing machinery. But dammit, I just can't trust the mail like I want to.