I've ordered lots of books over the last 2 months....most of them have been related to my area of study. In recent orders, I've picked up a couple books for reading ("Three Cups of Tea" per OMs suggestion and "Lamb-The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal"). Today, this book arrived (Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet"), and was marked "Media Mail: Subject to Inspection" and it seemed as though someone did open this, and then retaped it. Am I going mad or just paranoid?
10 comments:
Don't they have the right to do so?
And seriously, this is a good time to blame the Jews. It's a conspiracy.
(Sarcastic Egyptian here)
Chuckle, chuckle snort, OM! :-))) I think they do have the right legally. It bothers be because it's likely that if libraries must dislose what people are reading, it's also tragically possible that booksellers must divulge the same information. Further erosion of our personal rights. No one opened "Teaching Culture" by H. Ned Seelye, though.
how the hell they knew about content of the book?
by the way thx 4 sharing ur exprience although i dont agree with some of wut u said
Damn scary--Sometimes I dont feel I am in America anymore...that's all I have to say!
Be afraid... be very afraid. :-)
But the truth is that I have NEVER had a package opened in the US. Overseas they were always opened... along with your mail quite often, but this was expected since I was living in autocratic dictatorships with gestapo style police.
Welcome to the new America!! Salute the fatherland..err... Homeland...
VS
I know, VS...My husband says "so what if they're monitoring our phone conversations...Egypt has been doing that for years" and I guess that's the problem. That's the nation we've become.
Arab Lady, I don't know how they knew. Maybe I am just paranoid.
:-)
I do remember hearing the person monitoring my phone in Cairo... obviously a smoker. :-) It reminded me of my grandmother's party line in rural America of the 60's/70's.
VS
Cairogirl,
I think this has everything to do with the "Media Mail" way the package was sent.
Being "Media Mail" means it is not subject to the normal laws governing private correspondence.
The only thing allowed to be mailed at the very cheap "Media Mail" rate are movie, books, magazines and the like.
The Postal Service is allowed to look in these packages to make sure that the contents meet this criteria.
People will try to ship other items "Media Mail" to try and save a bundle on postal fees.
How do I know this stuff? Because when I came back to the USA from living in the UK I moved to Alaska but my belongings were shipped to Arizona.
I had my family package up some of my stuff and ship it to Alaska. This included about 1,200 CDs and a fair amount of books.
It took about 20 large boxes to fit them all and they were all shipped "Media Mail". So a box that weighed like 40 pounds cost like $20 to mail, where as normal rates would have been much, much higher.
My family happened to have put a pair of shoes in one of the boxes with CDs, this box just happened to have come open during shipping. When the postal office saw this he made me pay regular shipping rates for the box and explain the situation.
Abu Sinan: Good to know! I wonder why more of these 2nd hand book sellers (I've just ordered a bunch of books from different businesses) don't all mark the packages as "media mail".
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