Guess what finally showed up today? This morning I got an email from the USPS saying my package from MechTech that no one's seen hide nor hair of since December 2nd magically appeared at the Detroit distribution center last night. They got it to the Flint post office this morning and delivered it this afternoon. The 2-day Priority Mail took 22 days to get here and was lost for 21 of those days. No one had any idea at all where it was for 3 whole weeks. The replacement package shipped via UPS Ground on December 15th got here on the 21st. It took 6 days which is within the 5-7 it should have taken.
I got another package today too. It was shipped from New Jersey 2 days ago by UPS. So far they don't seem to be having the major problem the postal service is. They had a problem when the big Philadelphia hub where a lot of stuff in the eastern half of the country goes through was snowed in, but they rerouted to other places. There were problems a little earlier in the year in California when part of the state was flooded and part of it was on fire. I found that more amusing than I probably should have, but I guess the flooding eventually put out the wildfires. They stopped being a factor in packages getting through anyway. In the northeast there were 924 different zip codes with no pickup or delivery service because of the big storm the one time I checked. So they have local and temporary problems and they get over them, but the post office is screwed up all of the time. One of my brothers said when he gets packages they just sit in Detroit for 2 weeks waiting for someone to deliver them the last hour's drive.