Quoted from PC-Pin-NC:My brother used to work at our local UPS distribution center and he and I have 5 or 6 friends that work there. The attitude of those workers is horrendous. They treat every single package like total crap - throwing them, beating on them, kicking them and if they see one that says "fragile" on it, they make extra effort to destroy the contents. And of course they are freaking "union guys" so they can't get fired and they take advantage of that. It is a horrible situation where these guys have zero respect for their product or their customers. I hate UPS and avoid using them as often as possible. I am in the IT business and we have received desktop PCs that were beaten, thrown and kicked so bad that the expansion cards were dislodged from the motherboard even when they had screws holding them to the chasis.
Stay away from UPS!
I worked for FedEx Ground (formerly RPS) as a package handler all through college. I would say that putting the word "Fragile" on a box once or twice usually had no affect on how the box is handled, since that is the norm for pretty much every package. However if someone put the word "Fragile" on the box a ton of times, especially hand-written, they were just putting a bullseye on it and begging for it to be beat to hell. Those workers handle from several hundred to a few thousand packages a night and none of those packages are special unless there's something about it that annoys them.
