Wed 11 Apr 2012
Airmail?
Posted by anaglyph under Gadgets, Idiots, Silly, Technology
[21] Comments
I just paid a whole heap of money to have some American air freighted to Australia. Well, pretty much. I ordered a couple of tiny connectors from Amazon and this is the box they shipped in. Note the matchbox for scale:
This is all I actually needed:
Yeah – I’ve never understood corporate airmail shipping. In addition to rampant “space waste”, it would seem that either passengers and individuals sending freight are getting *ridiculously* ripped off to subsidise it or the companies that make use of it build most of the cost into their product profit margins. Or it’s just magic…
Magic air, perhaps.
I’m not sure about the connectors, but they sell those matchboxes here in Sydney. I would have happily sent you one and you could have saved a third of the freight.
If they’d put the connectors in a coupla matchboxes I’m sure I would have saved TWO thirds of the freight.
For future fuckin’ reference, Charlie Utter’s freight company serves to transport to cocksuckers worldwide without necessitating payment in the form of a fuckin’ arm and a leg.
As long as you want to take the chance that the injuns might get yer goods. Or that cocksucker Swearengen.
I have no interest in audio peripherals, cocksucker. Fuckin’ new piano…
Your item in an overly-large blister pack in a box full of packaged air, transported no doubt from a country that wasn’t America to America to another country that isn’t America.
Boxception.
I figure it’s just a new strategy for the US and China to unload their carbon on someone else.
Did you smell the air? Did it smell like freedom?
It smelled more like napalm.
Those matches look delightfully retro. I approve.
They are our famous Redheads, an Australian icon now owned, as most Australian icons are, by another country.
Those are our normal aussie matches. Cute huh! Although the contents are evil carbon-making sticks.
I think you mean “magic fire sticks”.
In your first sentence, you state that you had an American shipped over to you. Was he or she in the box as well?
On the plus side, at least Amazon uses air-pac instead of styrofoam shipping peanuts. Those things are a curse.
If I’d had an American sent to me I would have hyphenated ‘air-freighted’, I do believe.
And I agree. Styrofoam peanuts are the pits. Most packages I receive that use them also come with some kind of invisible spring-loaded device so that when you open the box, the damn things are propelled into every corner of the room.
Yes, I see now. There’s a slight difference between North American and Australian venacular. In NA, we would have used the word ‘air’ twice, hence the sentence would have read “…some American air air-freighted…”
Nonetheless, I understand your frustration with paying good money to ship essentially nothing.
I would use the term ‘air freight’ but also just the word ‘freight’ interchangeably, probably. I guess most things are air-freighted these days, but occasionally someone does stick the the stuff on a ship. Especially if it’s big.
Which prompts me to wonder how many of the containers I see down at the wharf are actually mostly full of air…
knock ’em off the dock. See if they float!
I might be tempted to try that but the harbour police take something of a dim view of people hanging around the container yards. For some reason.