thanks everyone for the get well soon wishes.
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That plus the disinfecting regimen (that's where the 80l of alcohol are coming in handy ...) should protect me at least a little bit.
In other news, the HP power supply arrived. The amp meter is somewhere in the case, the accompanying screw somewhere else, and the packaging was a mother of a fuckup using shoe boxes thrown into a large shipping box, then the power supply on top, plus another couple of shoeboxes to bolster it.
I'm suddenly having ideas of of Rube-Goldberg-esque closed circuit personal desinfection schemes..
That HP did look decent when you bought it, or did I miss something? Triple blasted primates!
That packing sure is bad. It seems to me that the care taken is reciprocal to the value of the goods sometimes, as the absolutely worst package that I ever recieved was my Analogic 800Ms/s polynomial waveform generator, where they filled the space with debris from a renovation obviously. Wallpaper with plaster clinging to it, parts of painted wood etc.
What some people apparently classify as adequate packing is completely unfathomable to me. How you can put a valuable, relatively heavy instrument into a box stuffed with shoeboxes, or in a box barely larger than it and stuffed with a thin layer of peanuts*, or wrapped in crumbled butcher paper than literally wrapped on one axis with cardboard with the open ends stuffed with more crumpled butcher paper and taped shut (the latter two being personal experiences in the past
month)
Do the shippers that do this sort of thing just not give a crap, are they really that naive to how packages are handled during shipment, or are they just dumb as a sack of hammers?
(I kind of lean towards the latter, as to me such piss poor packaging shows a lack of any sort of sense.)
-Pat
* edit to add - to be 'fair', the HP 8643A described here also had a layer or two of small bubble wrap around it, too. Almost forgot that little detail. It still lost two of its rear bumpers - threaded bosses broken and screws pulled out.