Having been in the delivery business for 16 years now, we’ve seen our fair share of strange and unexpected items pass through the doors of Spicer HQ. For instance, there was the time that on the very same day we opened two new accounts: one was to ship adult DVDs and the other one was for Bibles. You can be sure we were extra careful not to mix these two up!
But it’s fair to say we’ve never had anything as unusual as some of the items that have attempted to be sent via Royal Mail in recent years:
A couple from Yorkshire were abroad when their cat died and they wanted it shipped to them quickly so they could say farewell and bury it at their holiday home “before decomposition set in”.
A man from Birmingham needed his almost-finished ‘time machine’ to be brought to a friend’s house as it was too big to stay at his home. Apparently he’d been working on it for the past year and needed a company that could courier it without harming any of its “very fragile elements”.
A man in his fifties needed his collection of 500 Barbie dolls to be shipped to his new home with very precise instructions on how to set them up when they were delivered.
A devoted mum from Dorset tried to have an oven-fresh shepherd’s pie transported and kept warm for her son in Edinburgh, 450 miles away.
Two holidaymakers who wanted to sightsee around the south coast by camper van both hated driving it so much that they wanted it to be shipped there on the back of a lorry from Oxfordshire.
There was also a request to deliver an entire garden pond, including water and fish, to be taken 200 miles from Somerset to Essex!
Some of these beggar belief, but they have nothing on the bizarre selection of items that people have attempted to get through customs, which include:
An iPhone case shaped like a gun; thousands of dried caterpillars and banned marine life – at Melbourne Airport customs staff were alerted to ‘flipping sounds’ coming from beneath a woman’s skirt and found an apron of water-filled bags containing 51 tropical fish. But this is still nowhere as extreme as the lady who was arrested for trying to smuggle 75 live snakes in her bra!
But returning to strange items sent through the post; by far the most disconcerting has to be children. That’s right, back in the early 20th century, when the Parcel Post was formed in the USA, some parents took advantage of unformed regulation and sent their kids by special delivery as it was considerably cheaper than buying a ticket!
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