What? I mean. Really. Why does the USPS have a news release for dealing with holiday mail that says:
Always use shipping tape. Duct tape will not be accepted.
I can’t conceive of what possible harm duct tape will cause. Baffled. Baffled I am.
No duct tape?!
the only thing I can think of is that, since duct tape has a tendancy to develop sticky edges, they have banned it due to problems with adhesive transfering to their equipment..?
My wife says what E says, also that in extreme cold, it loses it’s adhesiveness and falls off. That’s her experience from working in a mail room.
They only accept Duck Tape
-d- That’s funny. Subtile, but funny. I think they don’t accept duct tape because it is metalic.
Back before I was a pro musician, I was a sound tech. (I was 18 and starry eyes for the rock ’n roll stage, but wasn’t good enough yet.) We used duct tape like crazy of course to tape down mic cords and whatever. The kind we use was called Arno, a brand name. It was gray. But at Christmastime we used red duct tape. We called it Christmas Arno. *g*
Sorry, I could resist telling this story. How ya been?
What’s USPS’s beef? If it’s good enough for NASA, it should be good enough for anyone, right?
Actually, duct tape (and duck tape(tm) have a number of nasty characteristics, because it was formulated for a purpose: to stick to itself.
Duct tape was made to hold things together, like a strap, and be cinchable by sticking the ends together and sliding into the loop until the loop is as small as it needs to be.
It doesn’t stick to other things all that well, which isn’t obvious at first glance, because it seems to stick to everything. But it is _really_ only intended for temporary jobs. After a few days, it dries out and gives up. In the cold, it gives up faster. On the other hand, if you get it wet, the adhesive oozes off the cloth part, and leaves sticky residue on anything it touches.
It is specifically formulated, by the way, _not_ to stick adhesive-to-cloth-backing-face. This makes it ideal for even more temporary uses. For instance, when I cleaned a nuke generator, we wore anticontamination clothing, and sealed the gloves to the sleeves (and all the other openings) with duct tape, _because_ it came off easily.
That said, there are, indeed, stories such as: At EB, someone cut a hole through a pressure wall on a sub. Realizing that they’d put it a few feet from where it belonged, they marked the hole by covering it with duct tape. Then, they promptly forgot to mention it to anyone. That area was painted over, the boat was commissioned, and taken out on a test run. When it came back in, someone noticed that there was an inward bulging on the bulkhead, and when it was investigated, the truth revealed itself: between the boat and sinking was a layer of duct tape and a few layers of paint.
There is every possibility that this story is false or embroidered to mythic proportions, but that’s the kind of following duct tape gets, go figger.
As for the USPS, they want to be sure your boxes get there intact. They’ve outlawed a lot more than duct tape: masking tape went first! They prefer packing tape (the clear plastic stuff, and the stuff you can get at the USPS is about 4 times thicker than the stuff you can get at K-mart, and much more likely to survive shipping) or strapping tape (with threads embedded in the backing. Having seen what happens to boxes that have been sealed with a few strips of duct tape that didn’t go all the way ’round the box, I sympathize with them.
One final anecdote, one I can vouch for personally: After the training for that cleanup that I mentioned above, I got some time on the town (with overtime pay in pocket) and found a music store. I loaded up on string quartet books and a few choral pieces I wanted to conduct, put them in a box and wrapped the entire box (no cardboard exposed) with duct tape. Maroon duct tape. It was moderately reddish. I taped my name and address and phone number to it, and taped on the airline baggage check as well. I was flying (what is now US Air) to Groton, CT from the west coast.
When I got there, the box wasn’t to be found. I did the usual reportage, and went home. Two days later, I got a call to come get my box.
It had AirFrance stickers all over it. Someone at the west coast airport had decided that the color indicated the airline, and (apparently) diverted it to a plane going to…Switzerland.
I’m just lucky they didn’t twig to the fact that it was the same color of tape used by the NRC to tag nuke waste!
I have nothing to report on duct tape, but if they’re outlawing iffy packing materials, photocopier-paper boxes are next. It’s always tempting, to send large sheafs of paper in boxes that are designed to fit, you know, large sheafs of paper, but copy-paper boxes seem destined always to fall off the top of a pile somewhere and rip open when they land, unlike normal boxes which would just take a gigantic dent.
This message brought to you by generations of micromanaging bosses.
My experience with duct tape is that it leaves sticky gummy residue and is impossible to clean off, so I suspect it depends on the brand.
Just found your post through Google. A clerk at the Post Office just told me why: she said that there are “wires” in duct tape, and when they scan the package- the parcel looks like a BOMB. She literally said my box, wrapped and sealed in duct tape, looked like a bomb. Maybe some kind of metallic residue in the tape? She also said that though the duct taped package can be accepted, more than likely- it would be inspected by hand and delayed significantly.
Hilarious!