[jedberg]

In the middle it links to the post he made on the 25th anniversary, which talks about how they would ship the gold masters to Europe.

He says they didn't have time in the schedule to mail it, so they would go to the airport, find a flight to London, walk up to the gate and find a passenger and ask them to carry a pack of disks with them, and tell them someone at the other end would meet them at the gate to pick it up!

Man how times have changed in 30 years.

[myself248]

A friend of mine had this happen with a processor card for a telephone switch. A bad software update had hosed up the primary card in such a way that it also made the standby unable to function, and they were capital-D Down for hours. The manufacturer was in Texas, the switch was in Michigan.

The soonest flight was a passenger flight, not a cargo flight, so they bought the box a ticket and sent it on its way. At the receiving airport, a logistics company picked it up and drove it straight to the office in need.

Thing is, the logistics company sent a semi. Because they hadn't been told the size of the shipment, just its declared value, and they reasoned that anything worth mid six figures must be big. So this intrepid truck driver couldn't (in a timely fashion) get close to the building, and ended up jogging across the parking lot with the card under his arm, as the tech headed down the elevator to meet him at the door.

"Sign here. What the heck is this thing, anyway?"

"Twenty thousand people's ability to call 911. Thanks, gotta go!"

[jedberg]

For most of my career, I've worked in ops for companies where every moment of downtime would mean the loss of a lot of money.

But I always tempered the anxiety by reminding myself that no matter what happens, no one's life was on the line from any downtime I might be responsible for.

[dylan604]

I love these kinds of stories. My current favorite is one I first read about here a few weeks ago where NASA needed some to replace a broken something holding up a launch. They arranged for an F-14 (or something along those lines) as a courier since normal shipping wouldn't get there in time.

[gambiting]

My dad used to do the same thing all the time but with trains and coaches - if you had to send something to the other side of the country pronto, you'd go to the train/coach station, speak to the driver, hand them some money, and they'd happily take whatever you were sending with them. It was literally the fastest way to get something somewhere. It doesn't surprise me at all that people used to do the same thing with flying.

[biztos]

In some parts of the world this is still the norm. I know someone who sends things to her parents (about a 10-hour drive away, in a village) exclusively by bus. You pay off the driver, tell him/her who's going to pick up the package and at what stop, and off they go.

Seems to work really well, from the POV of the driver, the sender, and the recipient. Cheaper than DHL, more trustworthy than the post office, faster than both!

It's routine enough I can't imagine the bus service doesn't know about it, my bet is they tolerate it because it lets the drivers make a living wage (and thus gets you better drivers) and because most packages aren't big enough to be disruptive.

[davidwritesbugs]

"Uh hey? Fella? can you do me a solid and take this small bag through customs and onto London for me? It's, er, floppy disks"

[kjs3]

Yeah. I'm all for rose coloured glasses looking at our logistics short-cuts, but I don't see this happening for real in the last decade or two.