Swedish Post Office Demands That Dog Sign For Mailed Package

A friend sent this dog named Chaya a new doggie toy
through the Swedish postal service, plunging her
into a funny bureaucratic mess.

If you want to send a doggie toy to a dog in Sweden, or anything to any animal there, don't address the package to the pet. Address the package to the animal's human companion.

Marie Palmgren and Chaya, her boxweiler dog, found this out the hard way.

A friend of Marie and Chaya's decided to mail a dog toy to Chaya. The friend playfully addressed the package to Chaya Palmgren.

According to The Dodo, this is how everything played out:

Marie got a note from her mail carrier that a large parcel had arrived and she needed to pick it up at the post office.  It was the doggie toy for Chaya.

In Sweden, the person (or animal) that receives a package at the post office has to show ID and sign for the package. Since the package was addressed to Chaya, postal workers insisted that Chaya had to show ID and sign for the package.

Marie tried to explain that Chaya was a dog and she'd sign it on her behalf.

But rules are rules!  "They still demanded an ID and a signature from Chaya, plus ID and signature from me as the 'helper' to fetch the package," Palmgren said.

The paw prints on this postal document after
Chaya "signed" it. 

Marie returned home, rummaged through some old records and found a registration document that proved Chaya was her pet. She grabbed the paper and headed back to the post office.

But Chaya still had to sign the document. Dogs are not allowed into the post office, which was another roadblock.

Finally, Palmgren  convinced a postal worker to bring an ink pad outdoors so Chaya could sign the paperwork.

Palmgren dipped a confused Chaya's paw into the ink pad and then pushed the paw onto the document, leaving a pawprint. Close enough to be a signature, the post office finally decided.

You can see the video at the bottom of this post a perplexed Chaya signing for his package.

Her bureaucratic nightmare over, Chaya
plays with the water fountain toy
her friend mailed her

You'd think the postal workers would have at least been amused by this situation.  Uh-uh.

"The staff was very serious all the time. It wasn't a funny thing for them.... Me? I was totally flabbergasted. When I reached the car, I laughed so much that I got a pain my stomach," Palmgren said.

To nobody's surprise, Swedish media had a field day with this, highlighting this as an extreme example of the super-strict adherence to policy by government agencies, The Dodo reported. 

The gift giver felt terrible her playfulness in addressing the package caused such a problem, but Palmgren brushed aside those concerns.

"She wanted to do a kind thing. She was so sorry that it turned into this circus of absurdity...But I told her, 'On the contrary. You managed to make so many people laugh.'"

As for Chaya, she reported loves her nifty water fountain toy.

Country Time Lemonade To Pay Fines For Kids Who Set Up "Illegal" Lemonade Stands

Country Time Lemonade has started Lemon-Ade - a team that pays fines
and permit fees imposed by overzealous bureaucrats who shut down
kids' lemonade stands. 

It's an annual summertime outrage:

A kid sets up a lemonade stand, and some overzealous bureaucrat in some hoity-toity town shuts it down, saying the kid needs a business permit, a health permit, all kinds of permits to sell a couple 25 cent cups of lemonade.

You gotta enforce those rules!

Country Time, Lemonade has used this state of affairs for what I think is a pretty ingenious marketing plan. The company will help pay fines and permits for kids nationwide who run afoul of lemonade stand regulators. The whole idea is called, of course, Legal-Ade. 

Says the Country Time website: "Life doesn't always give you lemons, but when it does, you should be able to make and share lemonade with the neighborhood with legal implications..... That's why wer're here to take a stand for lemonade stands across the nation."

Of course, bureaucrats shutting down lemonade stands isn't the biggest crisis to hit the nation recently. And it's not even very common, Adweek reports. The publications says there have only been about 30 reported examples of municipalities trying to shut down kid-operated concession stands since 1983.

The fact checking site Snopes.com said most of the controversies involved demands that kids get permits for their lemonade stands, and not fines for operating them.

Still, the Country Time Legal-Ade campaign plays well with the outrage we feel when some bullying adults try to mess with kids' lemonade stands. So it's a good piece of promotion from Country Time. Give that marketing exec a raise!

Here's Country Time's video on the matter:

It Practically Takes An Act Of Congress To Dismiss False "Camera Cop" Ticket

Laurie Roscow-Collins of Illinois has never been to San Francisco, doesn't own a semi truck and has never driven one.

Despite what San Francisco traffic enforcement
says, this Illinois woman does not own a semi-truck
and has never driven one. 

But, San Francisco traffic enforcement gave her a ticket for evading a toll on a Bay Area bridge in her non-existent semi-truck at a moment when she was nowhere near San Francisco.

The folks at the Bay Area's FasTrak traffic enforcement in San Francisco still thinks Roscow-Collins' excuse is pretty lame, and wants her to pay up. Or did until a television station intervened.

A semi-truck probably did run a toll on a San Francisco bridge. And it probably had the same license plate number as Roscow-Collins' car. But trucks have an "apportioned" label on their license plate. The Illinois woman's more modest vehicle has no such label.

You'd think a quick phone call would have cleared up the confusion, but Uh-UH!!!!

She had to turn to a local television station Fox 2 for help. The television station ended up having to contact the Illinois Attorney General, who in turn contacted California officials to convince them to watch the video of the alleged misdeed and therefore determine that Roscow-Collins had nothing to do with evading a toll.

She said it probably would have been easier just to pay the fine to make it go away and that's clearly what FasTrak had in mind. Instead of fixing the mistake they made, even a fix that takes two seconds of revised data entry, FasTrak apparently figured it would be easier just to make somebody pay, who cares who?

You just make a random person's life miserable and  complicated enough until they find it is easier to pay. Which is how Roscow-Collins got in that mess.

Also, the Fox 2 reporter said that FasTrack didn't bother to return his repeatedly calls and emails. Again, just keep victimizing some poor woman in Illinois to get your revenue. Whether she did anything wrong is besides the point.

She said she decided to fight because what if the person running the toll booths did it again. And sure enough, Roscow-Collins has received a few more tickets from that same semi-driver that is not her.

So she has to go through this mess again. Luckuly, with the glare of the media spotlight, FasTrak says it will void these new tickets and keep an eye on the situation.

It's unclear from the Fox 2 report what people should do if they are falsely accused of toll booth violations, like Roscow-Collins was.

Do they expect you to keep paying somebody else's traffic ticket?  Or just drive a semi truck through FasTrack's office?

Now, I'm awaiting my ticket for driving my rickshaw through a Seattle red light or something.

Could happen, right?

Why I Won't Ever Get an e-Book

News about Amazon cutting a woman off from her Kindle library, permanently, without explanation confirms why I'll stick to old fashioned paper books.

Beware the Kindle.

Amazon wiped away her library, and when she asked for an explanation, Amazon said she violated the terms of service.

She didn't realize she did, or how she performed such violation, so she asked what she did wrong. They wouldn't tell her. She did get this:

"We have found your account is directly related to another which has been previously closed for abuse of our policies. As such, yoru Amazon.co.uk account has been closed and any open orders have been cancelled."

The woman responded: "I am very surprised to read your email. What do you mean by "directly related to another which as been previously closed for abuse of our policies"? I can only remember ever having this one account, and I use it quite regularly to buy books for my Kindle, as you can probably see by my purchase history. How can there suddenly be a problem now? I use amazon.com and no couk for my Kindle, does that make any difference?"

Her questions seem reasonable enough, but the response from Amazon was basically "f*** you." They refused to give her any more information.

Even if she inadvertently did something wrong, is that any way to treat a customer? Apparently it is.

Now, if you buy a traditional non computerized book at a bookstore, as long as you pay for the book, the person who owns the store won't come to your house and take back the book if he doesn't like what you're doing with it.

Amazon, and presumably all e-book sellers, have no problem with taking back whatever you bought. Because you didn't really buy the book, as Wired points out.  In the e-book world, you just bought permission to read it on your device. The book isn't actually one of your posessions like it would be had you purchaased it from your neighborhood book store.  .

If you do something illegal, like shoplift from the bookstore, the cops get involved. You get due process. Unless you plead guilty, you get a trial where prosecutors have to prove your guilt in a courthouse, open to the public, before you are punished.

With the ebooks, there's no due process. A private corporation decides whether you are guilty or innocent, and that's that. Nobody has to prove anything. It's the corporation's way or the highway.

I suppose with ebooks, there's the risk somebody can illegally sell multiple copies of the publication, which violates copyright laws and screws over authors, publishers and others.

But, that's illegal, as I said.  Somebody can press charges and whoever is doing the illegal selling of ebooks goes to court and if found guilty, is probably punished. At least in a world that makes sense.

In the case of the Norwegian woman who had her library wiped away, there's apparently some complicated issue over territorial rights between different publishers in different countries that's involved in this, according to Forbes.

But how is the nice Norwegian woman supposed to know the intricasies of international publishing law? Couldn't they just tell her she was screwing up, and how she was doing it, in plain English, and make her promise not to do it again?

However, explaining this would make too much sense, and besides, cost a small amount of money better made available to billionaire CEOs.

I'm sure there's something in the terms of service verbiage that explains all that. But my theory is the companies that put out these long, complicated terms of service written in incomprehesible legalease that way so we're confusesd, we don't read them, and they can get away with murder. "Well, you agreed to the terms of service," they could say.

As if anybody in their right mind could read, much less understand that garbage.

When the media started poking around this case, Amazon responded with this:

"We would like to clarify our policy on this topic. Account status should not affect any customer's ability to access their library. If any customer has trouble accessing their content, he or she should contact customer service for help."

She did contact customer service and got no help, people!  No more details. Apparently, the media has no business asking Amazon about this, according to the brain trust there.

I know this type of incident doesn't happen too often, but it's enough for me to decide that my decision to keep buying traditional books is a good one.

People complain about government over-regulation taking away our freedoms. And there certainly is the potential for that. But why doesn't anyone complain about corporations coming up with dense incomprehensible rules. Doesn't that diminish our freedoms, too?