Some Observations on UPS et al.

Living in Alaska gets you used to shipping stuff. Whether it's bush orders, or buying speciality parts you can't get in the state, everyone has a go at it eventually. A discussion with an out of state acquaintance on her woes using UPS lead me to a stunning realization: UPS is run by cosmologists! I mean, of course, the physicists who describe the make up of the universe (and the >5% of it that is made of normal matter). This would explain quite a bit.

First, shipping companies seem to work on a different clock than the rest of us, when it comes to scanning in packages. Not GMT, PDT, or anything like that. No, hours can pass in minutes, and minutes can pass in hours. This is what you'd expect from shipping companies who occasionally accelerate close to the speed of light. The opposite effect must stem from the rest of the world, accelerating similarly while the package remains at rest.

Second, if you know where a package is (via a tracking service), you have no clue where it's going. If you know its velocity, you don't know where it is. This is keeping in line with the Uncertainty principle. Very rarely does anyone know exactly where the package is at any moment.

Other quantum effects can be noted in our third line of evidence, in that a package can be said to be delivered, and yet undelivered to the recipient, at the same time. This is keeping in line with the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics, showing that our package's wave form has not collapsed yet. This is worrisome because until it's observed, the package is both delivered, undelivered, and a Tyrannosaurus rex all at the same time. It's not that the T. rex is dangerous that worries me, but there's a sur-charge for shipping animals and I'd rather not pay it.

If it were observed, it would collapse down to a single state of being either delivered or undelivered (or less probably, the aforementioned Triassic animal). The package is rarely observed, however, because of our second issue - no one knows where the package is. I can only assume this inability to observe it is because they have near perfect information about the package's velocity.

Finally, packages seem to have a temperature, in that the faster they move from ground to plane to wherever, the more they're banged around (no matter how many 'fragile!' stickers you put on it). Packages that are sent over-night arrive looking like the army used them for target dummies, while packages sent two-day merely look like a herd of football players trampled it.

Clearly, the evidence is irrefutable. FedEx and UPS are run by physicists.