This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

If today you pitch me the idea of the US Postal Service.

There would be no way you could convince me that it could actually work.

I mean, it's not perfect as it is, but the fact that you can put a 49 cents sticker on an envelope and have someone deliver it across the country in two days is amazing.

Just take a second to imagine all the systems that have to work together to pull that off.

So let's stipulate postal services around the world are pretty great,

but with any complex design system there are failures that occur,

mail that never makes it to its destination and

can't be returned to the sender.

And it's into this rabbit hole that producer Somarra Freemark fell when she began searching for all the lost male.

Once upon a time I lost something in the mail. Maybe this has happened to you. It probably has happened to you.

But what makes my story different is that I went looking for what I lost. And the place I ended up was so strange, so dream like.

Something inside the box moving.

My name is Joy Smith. the box moving. But let me back up a bit. It was 2007, August. I was moving from

Minnesota to Michigan to start grad school.

I packed whatever couldn't fit into my station wagon

into three cardboard boxes and shipped them parcel rate,

books mostly.

The first box arrived at the leisurely pace the books shipped parcel rate usually do.

And then I waited.

For weeks.

The second box never showed, though when I say that it never showed, I mean that most of the box never showed.

...