I know the feeling. Although its delivery drivers that piss me off, with how careless they can be. Only the other week (no damage done, in this instance. This time..)
my old man got a package of groundbait for fishing in the main and the box arrive ripped and wet with the inside bag split open, which can only have happened during its parcel couriers handling of it.
It was just organic matter of a nonreactive sort. Fish food. Simplle, and harmless. But I dread the day when somebody is going to treat one of my packages like shite, and I either receive several thousand pounds worth (monetarily, not weight) of delicate glass shards and snapped circuitboards with a scratched up handful of bits of specialized analytical equipment driver software CD.
Or (for the courier) worse, they throw something about, and something breaks in the van etc. and its something volatile and dangerous. I've no sympathy for somebody that gets themselves killed because they treated my property like shit, flinging it money fashion (and I've seen them do it, the postal workers that is, fllinging parcels, even opening the door, rather than trying to deliver, not even ringing the doorbell or knocking, when I'm visibly in the front room, and throwing in the package like it was a sack of manure.) Some of those things.....jesus. Had they been not welll-packaged inside and protected by a lot of padding they have many times done things that could EASILY break say, a glass bottle of a couple of liters capacity and completey full of something highly corrosive, water sensitive, or that'd pure and simple burst into fucking flames the moment it met anything but inert-gas-purged (repeatedly) high vacuum line systems and direct bottle-to-reaction vessel transfer by positive pressure using cannulae (foot-long or so fllexible steel needes and oven-dried, helium or argon-filled and likewise all equipment, before putting it under vacuum before so much as a bottle be placed in a glove-bag or glove-box purged with dried inert gas.
Some day some bastard is going to throw a bottle of methyllithium in hexane or something like a dispersion of potassium or sodium hydride as though they were tossing a bloody baseball. And then they'll get much worse than 'fuck OFF!', which in any case would be made inaudible by their screaming as it turned into a ball of fire and engulfed them in extremely strongy basic (alkaline) and VERY corrosive nastiness in the center of a conflagration in as much time as it took them to break the glass being a wanker and a trace of oxygen to propagate in, they drop it at the first sign of flame round a crack, even if it'd probaly seal, abeit near unrecoverably dangerously so, due to caked-up decomposition products, and then shatter the fucker as a result, and same corrosive fire-bolt result unfolding in their faces.
Sympathy for the ones actually guilty of such? I'd just hope they lived long enough for me to demand reimbursement for another item in replacement, at least, but I'd not want anybody not responsible for such an event taking place and with them at the time getting burnt and corroded or a panic in a truck getting some poor bastard bystander hit by the truck because of the stupidity of its occupants.
I HAVE had an order of sodium metal literally thrown through the front door. If it had been packaged other than in a steel can, such as in a glass jar under mineral like sodium, potassium etc. metals are often stored and sold in and under, the can containing a pllastic inner liner, containing the sodium, smeared with vaseline-type mineral heavy heavyweight oil and vacuum-evacuated then heat-sealed under inert gas, that inner pouch then shipped inside of a second, larger bag inflated with dry inert gas, likey argon or nitrogen, don't know which. But if that had been in glass under oi and it had leaked and broken onto my porch carpet. Jeusus. You just DON'T use BRICKS of sodium metal like you were playing dodgeball with who you are meant to be hand-delivering the items to. And that brick of sodium, let just say it is of more weight than woud give you a wee pop when thrown into water as a lab demo. This...you wouldn't throw it in water or let it anywhere NEAR water in any quantity of the latter, and if you did, the thing to pop would be your skull and internal organs. And the windows would be blown out of the room if the door was closed and that all went 'pop', thing is at least the size of my fist.
And I had other flammables, including some that give off some very dangerous fumes if ignited on order too. Acetonitrile (MeCN) IIRC can give off HCN (hydrogen cyanide) as its burned. a big jug of THF (few liters), about 10 liters of isopropyl acohol, a fresh gallon drum of methanol....oh, yeah, thanks you fucking brainless cocksuckers, that thing with those and the 2 kilograms of red fucking phosphorus are marked 'delicate, keep this way up *big pointing arrows and big letters a one-eyed old fart of 90 with a cataract could read from halfway to sodding mars. You don't toss things marked like that, listed with customs forms proclaiming them to contain chemicals for laboratory use within, and throw bricks of sodium into people's porches unless you are trying to commit arson if you know the kind of chemicals present. If you don't then your comitting at the absolute minimum, gross stupid-fucking-ratbastardly negligence by means of being a fuckbrained inbred cretinous shitweasel undeserving of embezzling my entitlement of oxygen from within my own home as they deliver, and are paid to deliver said items.
And hazard aside, there were valuable items in there, some of them just plain pricy, some needing special shipping for hazardous materials, and more expensive thus, and some valuabe from coming from non-overt channels of mine because they are hard to find non-watched, and 'clean-skinned' so to speak. Just because they might have certain uses by certain people some of the time. And I'm bollocksed off big time if I want to ever pay thousands of pounds for a long-saved-for uber-sized batch of luxury-chemicals (if the latter term makes sense...I mean the things that hobbyist chemists all want to have but 95% of them can't have because they are very difficut to make and even harder to find somebody who will sell them to you and keep their mouths shut, if they will make a sale whatsoever. Hence luxury goods from a chemist's point of view. The O-chemist hobbyist's answer to fine havana cigars and long-aged (yuck) wine ( / yuck)
( I see 'can't sell you that' and just approach the problem with finding those who will. And where there is a will, in the absence of its being the kind read upon the demise of a dead relative dishing up an inheritance, there is also a way
And I've a knack somewhat of finding said ways. But that kind of goods, I would be WAY beyond livid if damage or not I saw the delivery driver chuck any of them anywhere. And yes I'd pull them up in the street on something of that magnitude and potential hazard and give them a very loud, very public bollocking that'd be as corrosive and poisonous as anything I might ever have delivered, right then and there after I yank them out of their delivery van and give them an earful they'd never forget of words used in ways nobody under the age of at leasts fifty ought to know exist
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