I'm sending some books to my mother for her birthday and decided to use a tracked service. 
Imagine my surprise when I saw the roundabout route that it has taken, a distance of 316 miles compared to the 25 miles that it would take to go directly there. 
So it travelled about 290 miles that weren't necessary.

Yeah, why they thought that sending it to Glasgow and back again was a good idea is beyond me 

Mind you, that's not as bad as the time when a parcel sent to me from the US apparently found its way to Tokyo..! It arrived the day after I got that tracking message though, so I suspect it was someone at USPS having an April Fool joke, as it was then that it happened. It gave me a fright for a moment or two, though 

Yeah, why they thought that sending it to Glasgow and back again was a good idea is beyond me 

Mind you, that's not as bad as the time when a parcel sent to me from the US apparently found its way to Tokyo..! It arrived the day after I got that tracking message though, so I suspect it was someone at USPS having an April Fool joke, as it was then that it happened. It gave me a fright for a moment or two, though 

Might be a system bug, but the bulbs you sent me got stuck in Miami after coming from Chicago and evetally landed in KC.

Yeah, we noticed that, maybe they felt like a road trip 

I'm sending some books to my mother for her birthday and decided to use a tracked service. 
Imagine my surprise when I saw the roundabout route that it has taken, a distance of 316 miles compared to the 25 miles that it would take to go directly there. 
So it travelled about 290 miles that weren't necessary.

It is normal (i worked 3 month as postman): when you send a letter, parcel, ecc, it is collected to local post office and go to the sorting center (one or more, it depends about destination) and, if there are some incorrect sorting, parcel may be jumping between sorting centers.
It rarely happens, but it happens.

I know that it sometimes happens, but to go to Glasgow from Aberdeen, then back to Aberdeen before going out for delivery is a bit bizarre...