Where are you, Sonnet No. 99?

I shipped Sonnet № 99 off to Oxford last Tuesday by UPS, with a promise that it would arrive there today.

It did not.

Here’s the latest UPS tracking information for the parcel:

The UPS call centre tells me that my parcel was “subject to a security scan which was beyond our control” by way of explaining the delay. It all goes well this won’t prevent the package from being at Oxford by the September 30 deadline – thank goodness I shipped it as early as I did – but I’ve little faith in UPS as I see the back and forth the parcel went through.

Charlottetown to Dieppe to Lachine to start things off make sense to me. But why did the parcel go across the border to Plattsburgh, 100 km away, only to come back to Lachine two days later, and then on to Mirabel, and then back to the USA to Louisville (UPS’s main hub) and then back up to Philadelphia (from where, I presume, it’s headed overseas).

Perhaps I’m too stuck on an old world “the fastest route from point A to point B” way of thinking about global logistics, but this makes no sense to me, and I can’t imagine why it’s efficient to send a parcel back and forth across the U.S. border twice when sending it from PEI to the United Kingdom.