8 ms·

Postman delivers 'somewhere in Sheffield' parcel

81 points by blacktulip 6y ago

iron0013 6y ago
Reminds me of the famous case of a letter addressed solely with a drawing of Alfred E. Neuman being successfully delivered to the offices of Mad Magazine!
- reaperducer 6y ago
  These sorts of things were once common. Fans would send letters to Rip Torn by simply putting a little tear in the envelope. Chicago had a Sherman Hotel where the Thompson Center is now. People from the south refused to write the name "Sherman," so the post office got used to delivering letters addressed to things like "That hotel whose name must not be written, Chicago." Large post offices had entire departments of people to decode addresses back then. Today the letter either gets bounced, or sent to the dead letter office.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Large post offices had entire departments of people to decode addresses back then. Today the letter either gets bounced, or sent to the dead letter office. The costs of automation. Instead of communicating with a human who can be flexible enough to joke with, you communicate with a machine you have to rigidly and humorlessly conform to.
hirundo 6y ago
I once had a UPS driver deliver a package to me where my entire name and address were so badly mangled that I had no idea how he did it. It was almost random, looked like a base64 encoding, but wasn't. But he got it in one try. It was about the same size as a few other recent deliveries I'd had, so maybe that explained it. But I decided it was UPS ESP.
- derefr 6y ago
  Perhaps the UPS logistics backend was fed a photo of the recipient address, and did a likelihood analysis of what the text in the image could potentially be OCRed to, given the places the sender usually sends stuff, the mass+volume of the box, the content-type customs declaration (if any), etc.; and it ranked your address as the first one to try. Is that within the current state of the art—metadata-assisted OCR like that?
  - brianwawok 6y ago
    Who knows. I recently ordered a 12 foot long rug. It got delivered by fedex to a lady across town. Neither the address nor the lady had anything to do with me. Wasn’t like a one letter off thing. Called fedex and they were like that’s weird. Let me call the driver. Like 4 days later the driver went to the ladies house, got it back, and brought it to me.
    - tzs 6y ago
      I have a PO box in Poulsbo, WA, 98370. I received something addressed to the box with the same number in Cleveland, TN, 37320. That's off by 2600 miles. The address was a printed label, not some badly scrawled barely legible handwritten mess, and so poor handwriting recognition does not explain it.
      - ethbro 6y ago
        I think most postal routing does something akin to (initial read) -> (write machine readable code) -> (internal mapping of code to location) -> (physical routing). And if it falls off the fast-path, remote human transcription is used at the origination tagging step. Expect even with error-tolerant encoding, sometimes the codes themselves get corrupted (smudged, misread, etc). In which case mail ends up at (corrupted code location) instead of expected. E.g. one bit-flip, which may or may not be physically adjacent.
        netsharc 6y ago
derefr 6y ago
I feel like being a postman is a pretty sucky job nowadays (it’s essentially the same time-pressured “throw the parcel at the door” service that FedEx and UPS insist on, but for the government.) But there’s a lot of potential for it to be a good, rewarding job full of community-building. And it used to be! Postal workers used to provide all sorts of informal, impromptu community services, since they were one of the few people in a town that would visit everyone in town, or in an area of town; and so one of the few people in town who would know literally everybody. Postal workers were asked to check up on people no one had seen in a while; asked to escort people’s children to their relative’s house (which tabloids called “mailing your children”); and many other “little” services that nowadays have no real locus-of-responsibility on which to fall. Maybe the problem is that there’s more mail to be delivered than there are postal workers to deliver it; and we can’t afford, through our taxes, the number of postal workers that would actually be required to deliver all the mail while also going above-and-beyond in all these other ways. I wonder whether, in a world with Universal Basic Income, being a postal worker would be seen as a vocation, like being a priest. Not something you do for money; rather, something you do because you like the effect it has on your community, and want to be a part of that effect. I have a feeling that there’d be a lot more stories like this in such a world.
- mdorazio 6y ago
  I feel like it’s only gotten to be a time pressured, low interaction profession in urban areas where economics is against community. It might still be a great job in smaller towns.
  - DFHippie 6y ago
    It's the other way around, economically speaking. The expensive routes that lose the postal service money are the rural ones. If they only delivered within and between cities, they be okay. (And if one political party wasn't bent on their destruction they'd also be okay. Obviously I'm speaking about the US postal system here.)
    - subspaceman 6y ago
qubex 6y ago
I’m still very much a pen & paper kind of person; if there’s something worth communicating, I prefer to break out the fountain pen and the writing paper. I’ve got a drawer full of envelopes and stamps and I keep resupplying. I’m also one of the few people who still sends (sent) postcards when travelling (travelled) —all duly adjusted for the current state of affairs, of course— mainly because sending a tangible item with a postmark and perhaps the GPS coordinates of where you’re sending from is now a novelty. Anyway, I have to say, my experience with flawed or incomplete addresses has been very disappointing. Many people probably just pick up the unsolicited commercial mail that drops into their inboxes in industrial quantities and just discard it en masse, probably with that tiny proportion of actual ‘valuable’ material inside. The postal system really is quite amazing. We tend to think of it as archaic but in reality it’s an enormously powerful, flexible, and efficient logistics system that spans the planet. What never ceases to boggle my mind is how it comes down to people: when envelops go through the sorting facility, those that are hard to parse with OCR are read by people (and it depends on the legibility of your handwriting!), that last mile depends on a person, and again, in this case, an anomaly was (successfully) managed by a person. It’s all very touching.
- nkrisc 6y ago
  It really is amazing. Both how fast items can travel across a country or around the world to a specific person, but also just the sheer volume of material moved. I just wish it wasn't primarily used to deliver what is literally trash into my mailbox. I say literally because I take most everything that shows up in my mailbox and throw it straight in the trash.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  A lot of the angst against the post office is fueled by various political motivations. It’s one of the few remaining federal-ish organizations governed by merit based civil service, which is the root of a lot of objections in certain quarters. Exams don’t really care who you are or what you look like. You also have other entities with their eyes on potentially lucrative contracts for first class mail and other mandated carve outs like delivery to Alaska. Similarly to how certain Senators from Pennsylvania are always concerned about the National Weather Service giving away data that Accuweather would like to sell, shippers would love to 10x the cost of delivering mail.
renewiltord 6y ago
Hahaha, I thought it was going to be something fancy but it's freaking Kvikk Lunsj. If you don't know what that is, it's Scandinavian Kit Kat. That makes this even better.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  I think this is wildly inappropriate. To label something as "vital survival stuff" puts a moral burden on the postman to figure it out.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Oh I wouldn't sweat it. That's just British for "not vital for survival".
globular-toast 6y ago
When I was a child I wrote a letter addressed to "Wallace and Gromit Ltd" and a few weeks later I got a reply from Aardman Animations. I didn't think much of it as a child but someone clearly did a bit of manual work to get that to the right destination.
- niklasrde 6y ago
  That’s adorable! Was that in the UK?
- dylan604 6y ago
  Where do all of the letters mailed to "Santa Clause, North Pole" get sent?
  - clort 6y ago
    I have worked at a Royal Mail manual data entry centre several times, typing addresses which the machines cannot read. The rule is that if there is a valid country, it must be sent to that country (it is a legal requirement). Otherwise it gets sent to the Royal Mail Santa office which is in Belfast (who have legal permission to open mail which cannot be delivered) and they will, if possible, send a card in reply. If I recall correctly, their postcode is BT1 1SX. It is reasonably common to send mail to 'Santa, Lapland' which of course is an area of Finland so must be sent there and they have their own offices who reply. Also Greenland was used I don't know what they did.
  - carapace 6y ago
    To Santa, at the North Pole, natch! :)
  - ThinkingGuy 6y ago
    In the US, at least, a lot of them get forwarded the town of North Pole, Alaska (postal code 99705). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole,_Alaska#In_popular_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole,_Alaska#In_popular_...
    - 6y ago
ilamont 6y ago
There used to be a printed magazine called "Spy" in the 80s and 90s that did various pranks and experiments with the U.S. mail. One of them involved sending mail to people across the country with missing elements like zip codes, street names, and states and seeing if it arrived. I remember that mail with just a name and zip code tended to get to its destination, even if the street was not included. Other Spy pranks included sending out bogus catalogues to freshmen congressmen to see who would order coffee cups and T-shirts with ridiculous government-themed slogans, and the famous expose of which billionaires would go through the trouble of cashing progressively tinier checks ("Who is America's cheapest Zillionaire?"). https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-files-spy-magazine-prank/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-files-spy...
- clairity 6y ago
  wasn't trump a winner of cheapest (fake) billionaire by trying to cash a $1 check, or something like that?
  - ilamont 6y ago
    Yes. He and a Middle East arms dealer were the only ones to cash the third (and cheapest) round of checks, worth just $0.13 each.
    - eloff 6y ago
      That's hilarious. I doubt he did that personally though. He probably has an assistant who sorts through his mail.
      - protomyth 6y ago
        It is probably cheaper for him to cash all checks than to get some assistant to only cash checks over a certain amount. I would imagine there is a department of people who do receivables for him. Most likely it caused trouble trying to find the matching invoice.
    - 6y ago
netsharc 6y ago
The Wikipedia page for Mojibake [0] used to have this image: https://soup.lithen.de/post/286150021/An-image-of-a-post-envelope-with https://soup.lithen.de/post/286150021/An-image-of-a-post-env... (sorry, one has to click "ignore the SSL security issue"), someone got a Russian address to post a package to, but their email program decoded it using the wrong charset. The Russian post managed to re-encode the address anyway. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake
fotbr 6y ago
A few years ago, I placed an order from a small company on the east coast, to be shipped via USPS parcel post (ie, the cheapest and slowest option possible, though the company does pay the extra for tracking). In a rush, I fat-fingered the zip code. To compound the error, after submitting the order, their shipping software helpfully "fixed" the bad zip code by adjusting the city and state to match. The next day, when they sent the shipping confirmation and tracking email, I saw the error. Of course, contacting them was too late; they did ask that I give the post office time to sort it out but were happy to send another one if it was time critical. I opted to wait as the initial mistake was mine, not theirs. The package arrived a day later than expected, having gone to the small town in the wrong state, been kicked back as "no such address", sent to some big USPS facility in Chicago where they apparently figured out where it should go, manually crossed out the bad city/state/zip and wrote a correct one in and then came straight to me via the local post office, skipping the nearby sorting center that most packages go through. I don't know how they pulled that one off, especially in a pre-christmas shipping glut, and without the package ever having had the correct address on it until someone working for the postal service figured it out and fixed it. Having a unique name probably helps, as does having a fairly unique street address, but I'm still impressed it didn't just get tossed into the dead-letter pile. Living in the middle of the country, the post office's abilities are almost magic. Need to send a letter anywhere in the US? Two or three days, for a few cents (no idea what it costs now, I bought a few rolls of "forever" stamps at 40 cents apiece). Need to ship a package? USPS is often cheaper than UPS ground, nearly always cheaper than FedEx ground, and faster than either of them at still only two or three days. Same goes for receiving mail or packages. Quality of service of all three, I recognize, varies with location and people involved. Around here though, it is damn hard to beat the post office.
- justusthane 6y ago
  This reminds me of a similar experience I had recently, except with a different outcome. A friend of mine in Chicago mailed a package to me in Minnesota, but the post office accidentally entered his address instead of my address on the shipping label (with my name). So the package had my correct address handwritten on it, with the printed shipping label bearing his address as both the return address and the delivery address. Should have been easy enough to figure out, but it was delayed for almost three weeks while they figured out what to do with it. Just proves your point about QoS really varying depending on the people/locations involved.
Silhouette 6y ago
Sometimes people working at big name services do the most remarkable things, even in our increasingly automated and impersonal world. I also love that in some countries, children can write to Santa before Christmas, and an "elf" will get their letter and write back. It gives me hope for humanity. :-)
ddevault 6y ago
Postal Experiments: https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i4/postal-6-4.php https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i4/p...
Waterluvian 6y ago
An item from China got a wrong postal code and was shipped to Northern Ontario by accident. We got a phone call from a nice lady from a very rural post office saying that they think there's a mistake, our package is targeted to a long closed quarry. We confirmed it was a mistake but that the package was literally a dollar of baby safety latches and not to bother. Her response was an eager, "no! This is the most exciting part of my week!"
- m463 6y ago
  I'm a PI doing some PSI. and we're fresh out of rain, sleet or hail.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  Also the volume of material to be delivered is phenomenal. There's a completely mercenary reason to try to deliver everything you can - storing things costs money and you aren't in the storage business. This is why I don't pay merchants for any sort of expedited delivery. I live in a major port city. Any self-respecting delivery business has a depot in this city - some have several, which means any products destined for me aren't going via the far end of the country, or to a city I've never visited, they are definitely coming here ASAP. And once they are in that depot they are taking up space that the company pays for. The sooner my package is on a truck and delivered, the less it cost to store it, and the more profit they keep. Now, if I paid for the most expedited delivery, perhaps my package would make it onto the very first truck and I'd be the first stop and I'd be woken by an anxious delivery worker buzzing me. If I ever need something for 0800 the next day I'll keep that in mind. But if I'm a little bit more patient the next truck, or the one after, will have some space and my package goes in that truck. Maybe if I'm unlucky the product arrives at midday. Good enough.
  - donw 6y ago
    There’s another reason for postal services to go the proverbial extra mile: they are absolutely in the trust business.
    - 6y ago
dilippkumar 6y ago
I had an uncle who was famous in our family for his desire to test various systems. It was only a matter of time before he decided he had to test the postal service. He picked up a postcard, wrote his initials and his last name and his zip code, and dropped it off at a mail box when he was traveling. The postcard found it's way to his house in Bangalore, India in the 1990s (if I recall correctly).
- jfk13 6y ago
  As a young man, I spent some time in India. As an experiment one day, I wrote a postcard to my parents back in the UK, addressed in Devanagari script. In the message, I wrote something to the effect that it was intended as a challenge to the British postal service. It was duly delivered to my parents in rural Sussex, with a pencilled note saying "the challenge has been met".
- enitihas 6y ago
  Delivering to Bangalore might be easier though. In a lot of places in Rural India, house numbers simply do not exist, and addresses are of the form Mr. ABCD S/O Mr, XYZ, Village <Village_Name>, postal code, city, state The Village_Name part encompasses a very large area. The good thing is people in rural areas know a lot of people by name, so asking a small number of people for Mr. ABCD S/O Mr, XYZ turns out to be sufficient. But I often wonder how challenging it is to deliver stuff with so much ambiguity.
  - Someone 6y ago
    https://www.worldpress.org/Americas/592.cfm https://www.worldpress.org/Americas/592.cfm claims “From where the Chinese restaurant used to be, two blocks down, half a block toward the lake, next door to the house where the yellow car is parked, Managua, Nicaragua.” was a valid address at some time, and claims that works, in Nicaragua. Looking at Apple or Google Maps, it seems at least the major streets do have names (¿nowadays?), though. (Via https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/ https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...)
andai 6y ago
I worked as a mailman last year and a lot of packages from China had incomplete addresses -- but they all had mobile phone numbers. So a I'd send a picture of the package to the number explaining the situation and asking for the rest of the address.
- em-bee 6y ago
  chinese package delivery companies generally won't accept a package for sending without a phone number. on delivery the number is used to call the recipient for personal handover. i am not happy about the privacy implications but it does help to make sure that the package arrives
mkl 6y ago
My grandmother once sent a letter to my parents, where they lived at the time in Southland, a district of New Zealand. Unfortunately, Granny's writing was never the clearest, and the letter was directed ~20,000km out of its way to Scotland, despite having insufficient stamps. The posties in Scotland were unable to deliver it, unsurprisingly, but figured out the mistake and sent it ~20,000km back again, and it eventually reached my parents.
protomyth 6y ago
This actually is the normal for me growing up, except it was UPS and, occasionally, FedEx[1]. USPS doesn't deliver, ever. You rent a PO Box and that should be good enough. If we knew it was UPS, we would have an address like "House 311 Behind the School Loop". So, USPS delivers to PO Box and UPS would find your house or just drop it off where you worked because they knew that too. If a college won't accept applications from a PO Box then you don't get to apply to that college[2]. This in the modern, internet era, has become a true pain in the rear. So, somehow, somewhere, there is a list of street names for 911. This might or might not correspond with the utility company's idea of location. There are often no signs. To fix this, it seems a lot of websites and vendors are starting to use a USPS website[3]. I seriously think we need an article in the spirit of the name article[4]: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Addresses[5]. I would like to contribute one: "The USPS Address Lookup Tool only shows addresses that the USPS itself delivers and not all valid addresses for delivery." So, all that work to find out a real address doesn't really matter if the USPS doesn't actually deliver to that address, but UPS and FedEx are just fine. Never mind the fun practice of handing off the package to USPS for final delivery (looking at you DHL[6]) when the deliverable street address for UPS/FedEx turns into an undeliverable address for the USPS who will send it back unless you can convince your vendors to put the PO Box on line 2 of the address. Now, a normal person would think it might actually be an ok thing to get the real address added to the USPS system, but that is currently a bit of an exercise in phone tree spanning. Can you guess what I have been doing during this current unpleasantness? So, my fellow developers, please allow an override of your address checking. 1) oh, by the way, do not confuse FedEx and FedEx Ground when talking to employees of said companies, they are quite hostile. 2) almost as good as the old "we don't accept money orders" for weeding out those pesky poor people back in the day before debit cards and online applications. 3) https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?byaddress https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?byaddress 4) https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... 5) I guess https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/ https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a... is it. 6) ah DHL, who somehow shipped a printer intended for North Dakota to another tribal college in South Dakota (different tribe, different state) then had it go to Chicago and then Compton CA to be handed off to USPS.
twic 6y ago
My father told me that his Uncle Bill once got a letter that was addressed to "Bill James, Wales". Uncle Bill was a reasonably well-known rugby player at the time ('50s?), so the post office knew it was most likely him!
jamieweb 6y ago
I wonder whether there were any negative repercussions for the postman? I'd be surprised if there isn't a policy against personally contacting mail recipients. Surely it'd be some sort of data protection violation for him to have used the data printed on the envelope to find the guy on Facebook and send him a personal message? Or is ad-hoc sleuthing allowed to a reasonable extent to ensure delivery of mail? This is cool though, maybe I'm just boring. :)
- corin_ 6y ago
  A policy against contacting mail recipients? They're already allowed to knock on the doors of our homes to deliver something that doesn't fit through the letterbox, or requires a signature...
  - jamieweb 6y ago
    I mean a policy against contacting them outside of their duties of work. This is fairly standard practise for anybody with access to personal data as part of their job. I'm sure there's all sorts of problems, ranging from simple nosiness to people snooping on previous partners or crushes, etc.
ken 6y ago
The craziest postal delivery I ever saw was a letter sent to a person on a different continent, addressed only with a bang path.
tverbeure 6y ago
Back in 1995, my buddy and I were on our post-graduation Great America National Parks trip (17 of them, and 7000 miles of driving, in 3 weeks.) We sent a whole bunch of postcards to the home front in Belgium. One of them was sent to a friend who lived with his parents at a farm in Schepdaal, a tiny hamlet close to Brussels. The address was: John Smith Dear postman, we don’t know the address but it’s a farm at the end of the road somewhere. Schepdaal Belgium Of course it arrived.
gerdesj 6y ago
Graham and Heather BFPO 40 Granny's Christmas card was delivered. Back then Rhein-d had quite a few people in it. Wacky old West Germany, with Brits in it.
lisper 6y ago
In 1986 I was traveling through Europe after my senior year in college and met an Irish girl in Munich named Fiona O'Reilly. She gave me her address. It was something like: O'Reilly The house by the big tree Glenbrook County Cork, Ireland She told me if I was ever in town that I could find the house by stopping anyone on the street and asking where it was. So I did: I hitchhiked to Glenbrook (you could do that in the 80's), stopped a random person on the street, and asked where the O'Reilly house was. They knew. Good times.
- gerdesj 6y ago
  Good skills. I trust you were both lucky. Eire does have postcodes. https://www.eircode.ie/ https://www.eircode.ie/ Now where is that big tree: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.8623097,-8.3330293,3a,75y,169.45h,86.25t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sgcEKFbJgaAKO0YD_TpZvdg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.8623097,-8.3330293,3a,75y,...
  - lisper 6y ago
    I made up the "big tree" part. It was something like that but it wasn't that. I don't remember what it was. But it was Glenbrook. I wrote that part down in my journal. So yes, her house was around that street view scene somewhere. I doubt I could find it again, but the scene looks familiar even 35 years on. Not much seems to have changed there.
    - gerdesj 6y ago
      It's a lovely story. I hope you have some great memories. Sometimes I take a virtual wander around places I used to live courtesy of Mr Google and his mapping thing. It is quite nice to see how places have moved on after you knew them.
ToFab123 6y ago
I am the only person in my country that has my name. I have a few times received letters addressed to: First name, last name, country together with a friendly message from the postal service to tell people to use my full address next time.

81 points by blacktulip 6y ago

Reminds me of the famous case of a letter addressed solely with a drawing of Alfred E. Neuman being successfully delivered to the offices of Mad Magazine!

reaperducer 6y ago
These sorts of things were once common. Fans would send letters to Rip Torn by simply putting a little tear in the envelope. Chicago had a Sherman Hotel where the Thompson Center is now. People from the south refused to write the name "Sherman," so the post office got used to delivering letters addressed to things like "That hotel whose name must not be written, Chicago." Large post offices had entire departments of people to decode addresses back then. Today the letter either gets bounced, or sent to the dead letter office.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > Large post offices had entire departments of people to decode addresses back then. Today the letter either gets bounced, or sent to the dead letter office. The costs of automation. Instead of communicating with a human who can be flexible enough to joke with, you communicate with a machine you have to rigidly and humorlessly conform to.

hirundo 6y ago

I once had a UPS driver deliver a package to me where my entire name and address were so badly mangled that I had no idea how he did it. It was almost random, looked like a base64 encoding, but wasn't. But he got it in one try. It was about the same size as a few other recent deliveries I'd had, so maybe that explained it. But I decided it was UPS ESP.

derefr 6y ago
Perhaps the UPS logistics backend was fed a photo of the recipient address, and did a likelihood analysis of what the text in the image could potentially be OCRed to, given the places the sender usually sends stuff, the mass+volume of the box, the content-type customs declaration (if any), etc.; and it ranked your address as the first one to try. Is that within the current state of the art—metadata-assisted OCR like that?
- brianwawok 6y ago
  Who knows. I recently ordered a 12 foot long rug. It got delivered by fedex to a lady across town. Neither the address nor the lady had anything to do with me. Wasn’t like a one letter off thing. Called fedex and they were like that’s weird. Let me call the driver. Like 4 days later the driver went to the ladies house, got it back, and brought it to me.
  - tzs 6y ago
    I have a PO box in Poulsbo, WA, 98370. I received something addressed to the box with the same number in Cleveland, TN, 37320. That's off by 2600 miles. The address was a printed label, not some badly scrawled barely legible handwritten mess, and so poor handwriting recognition does not explain it.
    - ethbro 6y ago
      I think most postal routing does something akin to (initial read) -> (write machine readable code) -> (internal mapping of code to location) -> (physical routing). And if it falls off the fast-path, remote human transcription is used at the origination tagging step. Expect even with error-tolerant encoding, sometimes the codes themselves get corrupted (smudged, misread, etc). In which case mail ends up at (corrupted code location) instead of expected. E.g. one bit-flip, which may or may not be physically adjacent.
      - netsharc 6y ago

derefr 6y ago

I feel like being a postman is a pretty sucky job nowadays (it’s essentially the same time-pressured “throw the parcel at the door” service that FedEx and UPS insist on, but for the government.) But there’s a lot of potential for it to be a good, rewarding job full of community-building. And it used to be! Postal workers used to provide all sorts of informal, impromptu community services, since they were one of the few people in a town that would visit everyone in town, or in an area of town; and so one of the few people in town who would know literally everybody. Postal workers were asked to check up on people no one had seen in a while; asked to escort people’s children to their relative’s house (which tabloids called “mailing your children”); and many other “little” services that nowadays have no real locus-of-responsibility on which to fall. Maybe the problem is that there’s more mail to be delivered than there are postal workers to deliver it; and we can’t afford, through our taxes, the number of postal workers that would actually be required to deliver all the mail while also going above-and-beyond in all these other ways. I wonder whether, in a world with Universal Basic Income, being a postal worker would be seen as a vocation, like being a priest. Not something you do for money; rather, something you do because you like the effect it has on your community, and want to be a part of that effect. I have a feeling that there’d be a lot more stories like this in such a world.

mdorazio 6y ago
I feel like it’s only gotten to be a time pressured, low interaction profession in urban areas where economics is against community. It might still be a great job in smaller towns.
- DFHippie 6y ago
  It's the other way around, economically speaking. The expensive routes that lose the postal service money are the rural ones. If they only delivered within and between cities, they be okay. (And if one political party wasn't bent on their destruction they'd also be okay. Obviously I'm speaking about the US postal system here.)
  - subspaceman 6y ago

qubex 6y ago

I’m still very much a pen & paper kind of person; if there’s something worth communicating, I prefer to break out the fountain pen and the writing paper. I’ve got a drawer full of envelopes and stamps and I keep resupplying. I’m also one of the few people who still sends (sent) postcards when travelling (travelled) —all duly adjusted for the current state of affairs, of course— mainly because sending a tangible item with a postmark and perhaps the GPS coordinates of where you’re sending from is now a novelty. Anyway, I have to say, my experience with flawed or incomplete addresses has been very disappointing. Many people probably just pick up the unsolicited commercial mail that drops into their inboxes in industrial quantities and just discard it en masse, probably with that tiny proportion of actual ‘valuable’ material inside. The postal system really is quite amazing. We tend to think of it as archaic but in reality it’s an enormously powerful, flexible, and efficient logistics system that spans the planet. What never ceases to boggle my mind is how it comes down to people: when envelops go through the sorting facility, those that are hard to parse with OCR are read by people (and it depends on the legibility of your handwriting!), that last mile depends on a person, and again, in this case, an anomaly was (successfully) managed by a person. It’s all very touching.

nkrisc 6y ago
It really is amazing. Both how fast items can travel across a country or around the world to a specific person, but also just the sheer volume of material moved. I just wish it wasn't primarily used to deliver what is literally trash into my mailbox. I say literally because I take most everything that shows up in my mailbox and throw it straight in the trash.
Spooky23 6y ago
A lot of the angst against the post office is fueled by various political motivations. It’s one of the few remaining federal-ish organizations governed by merit based civil service, which is the root of a lot of objections in certain quarters. Exams don’t really care who you are or what you look like. You also have other entities with their eyes on potentially lucrative contracts for first class mail and other mandated carve outs like delivery to Alaska. Similarly to how certain Senators from Pennsylvania are always concerned about the National Weather Service giving away data that Accuweather would like to sell, shippers would love to 10x the cost of delivering mail.

renewiltord 6y ago

Hahaha, I thought it was going to be something fancy but it's freaking Kvikk Lunsj. If you don't know what that is, it's Scandinavian Kit Kat. That makes this even better.

klmadfejno 6y ago
I think this is wildly inappropriate. To label something as "vital survival stuff" puts a moral burden on the postman to figure it out.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Oh I wouldn't sweat it. That's just British for "not vital for survival".

globular-toast 6y ago

When I was a child I wrote a letter addressed to "Wallace and Gromit Ltd" and a few weeks later I got a reply from Aardman Animations. I didn't think much of it as a child but someone clearly did a bit of manual work to get that to the right destination.

niklasrde 6y ago
That’s adorable! Was that in the UK?
dylan604 6y ago
Where do all of the letters mailed to "Santa Clause, North Pole" get sent?
- clort 6y ago
  I have worked at a Royal Mail manual data entry centre several times, typing addresses which the machines cannot read. The rule is that if there is a valid country, it must be sent to that country (it is a legal requirement). Otherwise it gets sent to the Royal Mail Santa office which is in Belfast (who have legal permission to open mail which cannot be delivered) and they will, if possible, send a card in reply. If I recall correctly, their postcode is BT1 1SX. It is reasonably common to send mail to 'Santa, Lapland' which of course is an area of Finland so must be sent there and they have their own offices who reply. Also Greenland was used I don't know what they did.
- carapace 6y ago
  To Santa, at the North Pole, natch! :)
- ThinkingGuy 6y ago
  In the US, at least, a lot of them get forwarded the town of North Pole, Alaska (postal code 99705). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole,_Alaska#In_popular_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole,_Alaska#In_popular_...
  - 6y ago

ilamont 6y ago

There used to be a printed magazine called "Spy" in the 80s and 90s that did various pranks and experiments with the U.S. mail. One of them involved sending mail to people across the country with missing elements like zip codes, street names, and states and seeing if it arrived. I remember that mail with just a name and zip code tended to get to its destination, even if the street was not included. Other Spy pranks included sending out bogus catalogues to freshmen congressmen to see who would order coffee cups and T-shirts with ridiculous government-themed slogans, and the famous expose of which billionaires would go through the trouble of cashing progressively tinier checks ("Who is America's cheapest Zillionaire?"). https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-files-spy-magazine-prank/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-files-spy...

clairity 6y ago
wasn't trump a winner of cheapest (fake) billionaire by trying to cash a $1 check, or something like that?
- ilamont 6y ago
  Yes. He and a Middle East arms dealer were the only ones to cash the third (and cheapest) round of checks, worth just $0.13 each.
  - eloff 6y ago
    That's hilarious. I doubt he did that personally though. He probably has an assistant who sorts through his mail.
    - protomyth 6y ago
      It is probably cheaper for him to cash all checks than to get some assistant to only cash checks over a certain amount. I would imagine there is a department of people who do receivables for him. Most likely it caused trouble trying to find the matching invoice.
  - 6y ago

netsharc 6y ago

The Wikipedia page for Mojibake [0] used to have this image: https://soup.lithen.de/post/286150021/An-image-of-a-post-envelope-with https://soup.lithen.de/post/286150021/An-image-of-a-post-env... (sorry, one has to click "ignore the SSL security issue"), someone got a Russian address to post a package to, but their email program decoded it using the wrong charset. The Russian post managed to re-encode the address anyway. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake

fotbr 6y ago

A few years ago, I placed an order from a small company on the east coast, to be shipped via USPS parcel post (ie, the cheapest and slowest option possible, though the company does pay the extra for tracking). In a rush, I fat-fingered the zip code. To compound the error, after submitting the order, their shipping software helpfully "fixed" the bad zip code by adjusting the city and state to match. The next day, when they sent the shipping confirmation and tracking email, I saw the error. Of course, contacting them was too late; they did ask that I give the post office time to sort it out but were happy to send another one if it was time critical. I opted to wait as the initial mistake was mine, not theirs. The package arrived a day later than expected, having gone to the small town in the wrong state, been kicked back as "no such address", sent to some big USPS facility in Chicago where they apparently figured out where it should go, manually crossed out the bad city/state/zip and wrote a correct one in and then came straight to me via the local post office, skipping the nearby sorting center that most packages go through. I don't know how they pulled that one off, especially in a pre-christmas shipping glut, and without the package ever having had the correct address on it until someone working for the postal service figured it out and fixed it. Having a unique name probably helps, as does having a fairly unique street address, but I'm still impressed it didn't just get tossed into the dead-letter pile. Living in the middle of the country, the post office's abilities are almost magic. Need to send a letter anywhere in the US? Two or three days, for a few cents (no idea what it costs now, I bought a few rolls of "forever" stamps at 40 cents apiece). Need to ship a package? USPS is often cheaper than UPS ground, nearly always cheaper than FedEx ground, and faster than either of them at still only two or three days. Same goes for receiving mail or packages. Quality of service of all three, I recognize, varies with location and people involved. Around here though, it is damn hard to beat the post office.

justusthane 6y ago
This reminds me of a similar experience I had recently, except with a different outcome. A friend of mine in Chicago mailed a package to me in Minnesota, but the post office accidentally entered his address instead of my address on the shipping label (with my name). So the package had my correct address handwritten on it, with the printed shipping label bearing his address as both the return address and the delivery address. Should have been easy enough to figure out, but it was delayed for almost three weeks while they figured out what to do with it. Just proves your point about QoS really varying depending on the people/locations involved.

Silhouette 6y ago

Sometimes people working at big name services do the most remarkable things, even in our increasingly automated and impersonal world. I also love that in some countries, children can write to Santa before Christmas, and an "elf" will get their letter and write back. It gives me hope for humanity. :-)

ddevault 6y ago

Postal Experiments: https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i4/postal-6-4.php https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i4/p...

Waterluvian 6y ago

An item from China got a wrong postal code and was shipped to Northern Ontario by accident. We got a phone call from a nice lady from a very rural post office saying that they think there's a mistake, our package is targeted to a long closed quarry. We confirmed it was a mistake but that the package was literally a dollar of baby safety latches and not to bother. Her response was an eager, "no! This is the most exciting part of my week!"

m463 6y ago
I'm a PI doing some PSI. and we're fresh out of rain, sleet or hail.
tialaramex 6y ago
Also the volume of material to be delivered is phenomenal. There's a completely mercenary reason to try to deliver everything you can - storing things costs money and you aren't in the storage business. This is why I don't pay merchants for any sort of expedited delivery. I live in a major port city. Any self-respecting delivery business has a depot in this city - some have several, which means any products destined for me aren't going via the far end of the country, or to a city I've never visited, they are definitely coming here ASAP. And once they are in that depot they are taking up space that the company pays for. The sooner my package is on a truck and delivered, the less it cost to store it, and the more profit they keep. Now, if I paid for the most expedited delivery, perhaps my package would make it onto the very first truck and I'd be the first stop and I'd be woken by an anxious delivery worker buzzing me. If I ever need something for 0800 the next day I'll keep that in mind. But if I'm a little bit more patient the next truck, or the one after, will have some space and my package goes in that truck. Maybe if I'm unlucky the product arrives at midday. Good enough.
- donw 6y ago
  There’s another reason for postal services to go the proverbial extra mile: they are absolutely in the trust business.
  - 6y ago

dilippkumar 6y ago

I had an uncle who was famous in our family for his desire to test various systems. It was only a matter of time before he decided he had to test the postal service. He picked up a postcard, wrote his initials and his last name and his zip code, and dropped it off at a mail box when he was traveling. The postcard found it's way to his house in Bangalore, India in the 1990s (if I recall correctly).

jfk13 6y ago
As a young man, I spent some time in India. As an experiment one day, I wrote a postcard to my parents back in the UK, addressed in Devanagari script. In the message, I wrote something to the effect that it was intended as a challenge to the British postal service. It was duly delivered to my parents in rural Sussex, with a pencilled note saying "the challenge has been met".
enitihas 6y ago
Delivering to Bangalore might be easier though. In a lot of places in Rural India, house numbers simply do not exist, and addresses are of the form Mr. ABCD S/O Mr, XYZ, Village <Village_Name>, postal code, city, state The Village_Name part encompasses a very large area. The good thing is people in rural areas know a lot of people by name, so asking a small number of people for Mr. ABCD S/O Mr, XYZ turns out to be sufficient. But I often wonder how challenging it is to deliver stuff with so much ambiguity.
- Someone 6y ago
  https://www.worldpress.org/Americas/592.cfm https://www.worldpress.org/Americas/592.cfm claims “From where the Chinese restaurant used to be, two blocks down, half a block toward the lake, next door to the house where the yellow car is parked, Managua, Nicaragua.” was a valid address at some time, and claims that works, in Nicaragua. Looking at Apple or Google Maps, it seems at least the major streets do have names (¿nowadays?), though. (Via https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/ https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...)

andai 6y ago

I worked as a mailman last year and a lot of packages from China had incomplete addresses -- but they all had mobile phone numbers. So a I'd send a picture of the package to the number explaining the situation and asking for the rest of the address.

em-bee 6y ago
chinese package delivery companies generally won't accept a package for sending without a phone number. on delivery the number is used to call the recipient for personal handover. i am not happy about the privacy implications but it does help to make sure that the package arrives

mkl 6y ago

My grandmother once sent a letter to my parents, where they lived at the time in Southland, a district of New Zealand. Unfortunately, Granny's writing was never the clearest, and the letter was directed ~20,000km out of its way to Scotland, despite having insufficient stamps. The posties in Scotland were unable to deliver it, unsurprisingly, but figured out the mistake and sent it ~20,000km back again, and it eventually reached my parents.

protomyth 6y ago

This actually is the normal for me growing up, except it was UPS and, occasionally, FedEx[1]. USPS doesn't deliver, ever. You rent a PO Box and that should be good enough. If we knew it was UPS, we would have an address like "House 311 Behind the School Loop". So, USPS delivers to PO Box and UPS would find your house or just drop it off where you worked because they knew that too. If a college won't accept applications from a PO Box then you don't get to apply to that college[2]. This in the modern, internet era, has become a true pain in the rear. So, somehow, somewhere, there is a list of street names for 911. This might or might not correspond with the utility company's idea of location. There are often no signs. To fix this, it seems a lot of websites and vendors are starting to use a USPS website[3]. I seriously think we need an article in the spirit of the name article[4]: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Addresses[5]. I would like to contribute one: "The USPS Address Lookup Tool only shows addresses that the USPS itself delivers and not all valid addresses for delivery." So, all that work to find out a real address doesn't really matter if the USPS doesn't actually deliver to that address, but UPS and FedEx are just fine. Never mind the fun practice of handing off the package to USPS for final delivery (looking at you DHL[6]) when the deliverable street address for UPS/FedEx turns into an undeliverable address for the USPS who will send it back unless you can convince your vendors to put the PO Box on line 2 of the address. Now, a normal person would think it might actually be an ok thing to get the real address added to the USPS system, but that is currently a bit of an exercise in phone tree spanning. Can you guess what I have been doing during this current unpleasantness? So, my fellow developers, please allow an override of your address checking. 1) oh, by the way, do not confuse FedEx and FedEx Ground when talking to employees of said companies, they are quite hostile. 2) almost as good as the old "we don't accept money orders" for weeding out those pesky poor people back in the day before debit cards and online applications. 3) https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?byaddress https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?byaddress 4) https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... 5) I guess https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-addresses/ https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a... is it. 6) ah DHL, who somehow shipped a printer intended for North Dakota to another tribal college in South Dakota (different tribe, different state) then had it go to Chicago and then Compton CA to be handed off to USPS.

twic 6y ago

My father told me that his Uncle Bill once got a letter that was addressed to "Bill James, Wales". Uncle Bill was a reasonably well-known rugby player at the time ('50s?), so the post office knew it was most likely him!

jamieweb 6y ago

I wonder whether there were any negative repercussions for the postman? I'd be surprised if there isn't a policy against personally contacting mail recipients. Surely it'd be some sort of data protection violation for him to have used the data printed on the envelope to find the guy on Facebook and send him a personal message? Or is ad-hoc sleuthing allowed to a reasonable extent to ensure delivery of mail? This is cool though, maybe I'm just boring. :)

corin_ 6y ago
A policy against contacting mail recipients? They're already allowed to knock on the doors of our homes to deliver something that doesn't fit through the letterbox, or requires a signature...
- jamieweb 6y ago
  I mean a policy against contacting them outside of their duties of work. This is fairly standard practise for anybody with access to personal data as part of their job. I'm sure there's all sorts of problems, ranging from simple nosiness to people snooping on previous partners or crushes, etc.

ken 6y ago

The craziest postal delivery I ever saw was a letter sent to a person on a different continent, addressed only with a bang path.

tverbeure 6y ago

Back in 1995, my buddy and I were on our post-graduation Great America National Parks trip (17 of them, and 7000 miles of driving, in 3 weeks.) We sent a whole bunch of postcards to the home front in Belgium. One of them was sent to a friend who lived with his parents at a farm in Schepdaal, a tiny hamlet close to Brussels. The address was: John Smith Dear postman, we don’t know the address but it’s a farm at the end of the road somewhere. Schepdaal Belgium Of course it arrived.

gerdesj 6y ago

Graham and Heather BFPO 40 Granny's Christmas card was delivered. Back then Rhein-d had quite a few people in it. Wacky old West Germany, with Brits in it.

lisper 6y ago

In 1986 I was traveling through Europe after my senior year in college and met an Irish girl in Munich named Fiona O'Reilly. She gave me her address. It was something like: O'Reilly The house by the big tree Glenbrook County Cork, Ireland She told me if I was ever in town that I could find the house by stopping anyone on the street and asking where it was. So I did: I hitchhiked to Glenbrook (you could do that in the 80's), stopped a random person on the street, and asked where the O'Reilly house was. They knew. Good times.

gerdesj 6y ago
Good skills. I trust you were both lucky. Eire does have postcodes. https://www.eircode.ie/ https://www.eircode.ie/ Now where is that big tree: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.8623097,-8.3330293,3a,75y,169.45h,86.25t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sgcEKFbJgaAKO0YD_TpZvdg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.8623097,-8.3330293,3a,75y,...
- lisper 6y ago
  I made up the "big tree" part. It was something like that but it wasn't that. I don't remember what it was. But it was Glenbrook. I wrote that part down in my journal. So yes, her house was around that street view scene somewhere. I doubt I could find it again, but the scene looks familiar even 35 years on. Not much seems to have changed there.
  - gerdesj 6y ago
    It's a lovely story. I hope you have some great memories. Sometimes I take a virtual wander around places I used to live courtesy of Mr Google and his mapping thing. It is quite nice to see how places have moved on after you knew them.

ToFab123 6y ago

I am the only person in my country that has my name. I have a few times received letters addressed to: First name, last name, country together with a friendly message from the postal service to tell people to use my full address next time.