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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.

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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
    Where I am it seems like online shops already have an API to work with the post (surely UPS/FedEx too?). They would say using the API "I would like to register a package addressed to [netsharc's address]", and the endpoint would probably do that and respond with a barcode that the shop would print and stick to the package. Then the postman would just scan the barcode when picking up the package, take it to the sorting office where there'd be more barcode scanning and automatic sorting based on the ZIP code stored in the database entry identified by the barcode... So the only reading of the actual typed address would be when the mailman double-checks to confirm he's delivering the correct packages for my address.
ethbro 7y ago
Postal magic is weird. I feel like we all remember the examples when something went awry, but rarely stop to think about the times it surprisingly goes right. I had an Amazon package divert across the country, before falling into a black hole in a Milwaukee post office. After waiting a few days, Amazon CS shipped a replacement. A few weeks later, after the replacement arrived, the original package (looking like it had been dragged behind a truck) surprisingly showed up at my address.

tzs 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
  Where I am it seems like online shops already have an API to work with the post (surely UPS/FedEx too?). They would say using the API "I would like to register a package addressed to [netsharc's address]", and the endpoint would probably do that and respond with a barcode that the shop would print and stick to the package. Then the postman would just scan the barcode when picking up the package, take it to the sorting office where there'd be more barcode scanning and automatic sorting based on the ZIP code stored in the database entry identified by the barcode... So the only reading of the actual typed address would be when the mailman double-checks to confirm he's delivering the correct packages for my address.

ethbro 7y ago

Postal magic is weird. I feel like we all remember the examples when something went awry, but rarely stop to think about the times it surprisingly goes right. I had an Amazon package divert across the country, before falling into a black hole in a Milwaukee post office. After waiting a few days, Amazon CS shipped a replacement. A few weeks later, after the replacement arrived, the original package (looking like it had been dragged behind a truck) surprisingly showed up at my address.