Originally published at: Meet the man who shipped himself overseas in a wooden crate | Boing Boing
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What a lucky guy.
Sadly, it reminds me of people trying to stowaway on planes today. When I was working in West Africa some years ago, someone there tried that and died.
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He had a torch in there! Glad he didn’t burn to death! But I guess good for cooking!
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A cautionary tale…
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Um… Also this…
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It sounds like a far more dangerous version of what this guy did to gain his freedom.
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Futility Closet (I believe) did a story on the history of people trying this. It has occasionally worked, but mostly people die trying it because people don’t understand the trials and tribulations that a shipped package goes through. Don’t make life or death decisions based on a cartoon understanding of the world.
ETA: The episode may have been this one, but I haven’t re-listened to confirm: Podcast Episode 5: Mailing People, Alien Shorthand, and Benjamin Franklin - Futility Closet
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Good advice, which applies to a lot more decisions than just crate-shipping your live body somewhere.
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That’s nothing, parents used to ship their kids parcel post all the time, it was routine! Right, internet?
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I’m reminded of a far less harrowing tale of someone packaging themselves without thinking it through.
A friend told me about how, at their art school, some bright spark decided that they’d submit themselves as their application portfolio, so boxed themselves up and had themselves delivered. What they didn’t realize was the portfolios were submitted on Friday, but no one looked at them until Monday, and the work was stored in a locked office in the meantime. The staff opening up the office on Monday were quite surprised to have, bursting out as the doors were unlocked, one desperate, disheveled and somewhat dehydrated would-be art student - who left behind something of a… mess. (I don’t think they got admitted to the school.)
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Gods he was strong then.
Also came to post link to MC 900 Ft Jesus 
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People still mail live chicks. And it’s legal 
Thousands of chicks died because of the intersection of mailing live animals and the evil that is Postmaster DeJoy.
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One bottle of water, one bottle for urine? Poor planning. You really have to assume and prepare for the worst, but there’s no way to know how many different things could go wrong on a journey that literally goes to the opposite side of the planet.
This is like mailing children: the post office did it because they were trusted, and they built policies and plans around it to make it work out OK. (Obviously, children were not put into boxes and mailed; the postperson escorted them along their route until they got to where they were going, making sure they got there. While some kids were “mailed” longer distances, it was more about cross town trips.)
Honestly, I suspect that DeJoy had a darker mission than “just” throwing one election: the Postal Service is one of the most trusted branches of the government. Destroy public trust in it, and public trust in the entire government goes away, and you have more people ready to vote to tear it all down in the delusional impression that they will be the warlord and not the surf after it all comes crashing down…
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The irony is that these days the cheapest way of shipping X kgs of cargo is usually if those kilograms exist in the form of a human being who can sit in a plane seat. I, for example, weigh 70 kgs, a flight from where I live to New York will cost me 300 - 500 bucks. To ship 70 kgs of inanimate stuff from my home town to New York could easily cost me 5 times that amount.
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Having received a parcel this year that took over two months to go from New York to Ottawa (via Florida), he got off easy.
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