Lost oil sample (to the USA)

I bought my own HDPE bottles and asked for a discount on the analysis… Unfortunately the whole discount (and then some) gets eaten by the cost to ship the sample to Blackstone. Which reminds me I should see where that ended up, because no analysis yet.

Peter wrote:

I’ve not had a problem with Blackstone. I just tick the box on the sample form which requests more bottles.

I’ve also never had any problem with Blackstone. I usually order a dozen prepaid bottles to keep freight down and protect against eventual price increases.

I’ve been unable to send samples to the US from Switzerland for the past few years. No one, neither the post office nor couriers, will accept liquids for air freight any longer. A business opportunity for someone in the UK, to relay packages from Europe to the US?

alioth wrote:

Pilfering in the USPS system will be extremely rare.

I understand that mail tampering is a federal offence in the US too.

Im talking about Europe.

I did some work with the USPS a while ago (and while running a beta of our product, I was in one of their sorting offices doing on site support).

Pilfering in the USPS system will be extremely rare. Staff won’t even pick up a dropped penny off the floor because it could be misinterpreted as stealing. The sorting office and front desk has things that look like building structure coverings with one way glass in them – they aren’t to cover structure, they are catwalks where postal inspectors can walk unobserved and check the operation, which they do randomly, frequently, and unnanounced. There is of course also CCTV absolutely everywhere.

Of course the mail carrier could do so when out on a delivery round, but complaints of lost mail on a particular delivery round would soon raise suspicion.

The other thing I learned is that all postal sorting offices smell the same.

Peter wrote:

Out of the millions of tons of stuff carried by the 1st World’s post offices each year, even 1% (which is about the order of the losses) is a massive amount of stuff which, if truly lost in the system, would fill their premises to the roof.

Well, I reckon that if you send anything other than a standard letter in any “postal system” then you should pay extra to track/signature because its always the odd looking letter/package that goes “missing”. I suspect that there is an awful lot of pilfering going on, especially with anything sent abroad where one country can blame the other. Its just too coincidental that certain things appear to “go missing”…

Regards, SD..

Peter wrote:

for everything and the man just collects it all.

Actually, the posties does the same here. I use USPS (mail service) regularly to send stuff to Europe and you can do everything online and hand the package with the docs to the posties when he delivers the mail.

That said, right now, nothing really works because of Covid-19. I’ve been waiting for some documents from Europe for a month now…. at first they were returned to the sender, then sent again, now somewhere in space. They’re not important to me, but rather to the sender who needs my signatures. We’re currently trying to get a European country to accept electronic signatures…..

I am still not doing Oil Analysis and have filled up the US online form from Blackstone twice in the last 2 years. Then I forget about it until I need to do an Oil Change

Is there any secret to getting them to send you the kits? Last time I mentioned in the notes to send me more sample kits than normal as I do 25 hour oil changes. Talk about a way to p*ss off a brand new customer.

Have I just been unlucky?

€3.40, less than the Straubing IFR fee.