I've never worked in the delivery business, so I can't really add too much int he world of transferring one thing to one place and dropping it off for another person to pick up, but I do have quite a few stories about shipping.
When I got back from my mission I needed a job, so a family friend got me a part time job at a place called Namifiers. It's a stupid company that does nothing but make name-tags and customizable low end swag for companies that want to pay way too much money for a lanyard or a tee shirt. It was menial labor, it wasn't that interesting, and it was the sort of job where the majority of the people that I worked with in the warehouse didn't speak English as a first language, and very few of them had decided to pick it up as their second, and I'm pretty sure that the only time that most of them had ever held a green card was while playing Uno.
Either way, the job in the warehouse was to fill orders, make the stuff, and get things out on time. The only catch to that is that we had an entire huge warehouse to work with, but everything that we did, everything that really mattered was in a small corner of the warehouse leaving us well over 3/4 of the massive floor empty with nothing but random boxes stacked maybe two or three high, filling up the rest of the place. Most people when they think warehouse think that there are shelves and organization and lots of products, and you'd think for a company that specializes in printing names on things (seriously, that's the ONLY thing they did, their entire company was based on knowing how to put a name on something) there'd be a bit more organization with labels or something like that, but the rows of material just seemed to sprawl in every direction without anything really telling you what was on them except for stenciled black labels on the boxes (that were upside down or turned so you couldn't see them more often than not) to tell you what was inside the mystery box.
Either way, at the end of the day, there was always a rush to get things out before the UPS guy came to pick them up, and this is where shipping got fun.
It is a minor miracle, after seeing how boxes and orders were treated at that place, that any company that is ran anywhere similar to what that place was, ever fills an order. Shipping included the following process: Make a cardboard box. Grab the bin full of name tags, lanyards, or whatever other junk that had names on it was going to some company too stupid to figure out that anyone with a screen printer and a semi-competent graphics designer could do the same job, and dump them into the box. Shove in the invoice in, on, around, or just crumpled up between the name tags, and then slap the box shut with a healthy amount of packaging tape. Most people at this point would then go over to the shipping computer and print out the UPS ticket that would have the address the box needed to be shipped to. That's right, they would completely leave the box that they were working on (just a nondescript brown box that there were hundreds of in the area) to print out the ticket. Once the ticket was printed out you'd head back to your box and hope that no one had moved what you were working on, and slap the sticker on it.
I can not tell you how often I saw wrong orders get the wrong tickets on them, boxes get confused with one another so that they got double filled with two separate orders that weren't related to each other in any way, or even boxes that went out with nothing in them, but had a UPs label on them. Shipping was the final process of getting the order out to the customer at that company, and more often than not, ti was shipping that decided to have some creative fun with their job and completely screw up everything everyone had done to that point to make the order perfect.
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