{"id":3188,"date":"2008-12-23T07:39:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-23T15:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=3188"},"modified":"2008-12-23T07:39:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-23T15:39:00","slug":"shipping-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=3188","title":{"rendered":"Shipping Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s a post office day. I\u2019m shipping two conference<\/a> proceedings to Japan, which were relatively easy: one can now print International Priority Mail flat-rate envelope postage<\/a> from the USPS.gov website<\/a>, including the customs forms. I almost had another shipment… and therein lies a story.<\/p>\n

After my father died, I listed a number of his books and CDs up on Amazon Marketplace<\/a> (those for which I could get $2.50 or more, for otherwise it isn\u2019t worth it). Yesterday, I sold one, a book on word games<\/a>. The address was something I hadn\u2019t seen before: a guest at a state prison complex<\/a>. Now for books, one uses media mail, and the only way I\u2019ve found of being able to prepay media mail is to use the multi-order shipping tool<\/a> at Paypal. I couldn\u2019t get the tool accept the address — it was too long. After some rearranging, I got it down to acceptable length–and then it wouldn\u2019t validate. I tried checking the address as the usps.gov site, but I couldn\u2019t get it to validate either. So I called the prison. After finally speaking to someone in mail services, it turns out that even if I figured out the address, they wouldn\u2019t have accepted the shipment. Guests can only receive books directly from the publisher or from a well-known bookseller<\/a>, such as Amazon or Barnes and Nobel. So I\u2019ve communicated with the purchaser (not the guest at the facility, but someone buying the book for them), and have refunded the money. But it was certainly a learning experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s a post office day. I\u2019m shipping two conference proceedings to Japan, which were relatively easy: one can now print International Priority Mail flat-rate envelope postage from the USPS.gov website, including the customs forms. I almost had another shipment… and therein lies a story. After my father died, I listed a number of his books Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[197],"class_list":["post-3188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lj-xfer","tag-this-is-not-a-tag"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3188\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}