Getting to the next meetup
July 26, 2015 12:06 PM   Subscribe

Sometimes successful (historically) mailing one's self is not a good plan: Whether to escape slavery or merely the cost of a plane ticket, people have been trying for over a century and a half to package themselves like so many rolls of toilet paper from Amazon.
posted by sammyo (14 comments total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
“A few air holes, some water, perhaps some midnight snacks, and it would probably be as good as going tourist.”
posted by scruss at 12:13 PM on July 26, 2015 [3 favorites]




I have been on some planes where I'm sure the cargo hold would have been more pleasant than a middle seat on aisle 27.
posted by Bringer Tom at 12:28 PM on July 26, 2015


Otherwise it’s pretty much no problem to mail a baby alligator.

Hmmm...

Baby alligators?
Check.

Padded mailing envelopes?
Check.

Enemies list?
Check.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:49 PM on July 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


There's a rather good episode of The Memory Palace podcast about Henry Box Brown.
posted by stanf at 2:13 PM on July 26, 2015


The only modern surviving airplane stowaways, like 21-year-old Indonesian man Mario Steven Ambarita, who survived a flight from Sumatra to Jakarta earlier this year, have tended to try for short flights at low altitudes.

Not always; just from my own memory, last year there was Yahya Abdi, who survived a flight from California to Hawaii, which is a 5+ hour flight.
posted by tavella at 3:06 PM on July 26, 2015


It seems like the point of the article is that it sometimes works out.
posted by wotsac at 4:22 PM on July 26, 2015


I cannot of course remember the guy's name, but in the excellent The Warmth of Other Suns, the story is told of a civil rights journalist in the 1960s who escaped an asylum in Mississippi by doing the Box Brown trick. Apparently it works at least once a century?
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 4:43 PM on July 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Sort of a tangent, but I once read a novel set in the 1920s Mississippi River Delta, in which poor people would ship a very sick family member to a hospital in New Orleans by railroad freight. Not in a box, but lying on the floor of the freight car with an address pinned to their blanket - it was much cheaper than a passenger ticket. A little Googling doesn't turn up anything about this - anybody know if it really was the practice among the rural poor at the time?
posted by Quietgal at 6:55 PM on July 26, 2015


Sometimes it doesn't work out.
posted by andraste at 8:40 PM on July 26, 2015


Otherwise it’s pretty much no problem to mail a baby alligator.

Hmmm...

Baby alligators?
Check.

Padded mailing envelopes?
Check.

Enemies list?
Check.


I am highly in favor of this plan, but am concerned with a couple matters:

Firstly, a padded mail is nowhere near enough protection for an innocent reptile.

Secondly, it is tedious in the extreme to dispatch ones enemies with a single baby alligator, and the new size rules are very limiting.

The rules for mailing baby alligators are as follows: The alligator must be under 20 inches in length, it must not require any food or water during its journey, and it must not create “sanitary problems” or “obnoxious odors.” Otherwise it’s pretty much no problem to mail a baby alligator.

It is therefore necessary that we figure out how to ship 40-50 baby alligators so that they arrive at the victim's doorstep at the same time, and then either induce him or her to open and set aside all the parcels in question or turn to some sort of electromechanical device to open all the flaps at once.

Regarding the shipping question, my colleagues have had the most luck with DHL; the germans are very understanding regarding these matters.
posted by sebastienbailard at 10:37 PM on July 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Regarding the shipping question, my colleagues have had the most luck with DHL; the germans are very understanding regarding these matters.

Outstanding.

Agent 49017, this is the sort of far-sighted logistics planning we need for this operation.

We shall contact our operatives in Düsseldorf forthwith.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:09 PM on July 26, 2015


I love that it took only 20 mins for the VU link.
posted by persona au gratin at 1:36 AM on July 27, 2015




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