12 ms·
Postcard stamped in 1920 delivered 100 years later
- alex_g 6y agoThe response from USPS is what I expected. It's unlikely this was in the system for 100 years, but someone put it in the mail recently and the USPS decided to deliver it.
- colejohnson66 6y agoBut doesn’t the postmark mean it arrived at the destination’s post office (although this was 100 years ago, so things may’ve changed)? So if it has a postmark of 1920, the USPS has it then. It is entirely possible it was delivered, then someone decided to drop it back in the system a few days ago.
- ghaff 6y agoPostmark is at the originating post office (usually). But what you say is still almost certainly true.
- ghaff 6y agoThat seems almost certainly the case. It seems unlikely that any USPS sorting facility or post office where this could have fallen behind something would still be in use 100 years later (at least without extensive renovations/changes).
- tobyjsullivan 6y agoImprobable things happen frequently at scale. One possible scenario is just that this card got lost twice. It could have slipped behind a counter at the original post office and been uncovered when that office was decommissioned 35 years later. Then it would have made its way to a newer sorting facility where either it could have been misplaced again or, more likely, been stuffed in a cabinet somewhere (as I doubt USPS was as adamant about delivering lost mail in the 1950's). That facility could easily be in operation until today - or decommissioned very recently. No idea if anything like this actually occurred. But at 400M+ letters / day, USPS has the scale for unusual circumstances like this to be somewhat regular occurrences.
- wtn 6y agoUSPS was probably much more adamant about delivering lost mail in the 1950s. The level of service was higher, with twice daily delivery.
- codezero 6y agoI never knew they did twice daily deliver, time to google up some more info!
- _whiteCaps_ 6y agohttp://500years.royalmailgroup.com/gallery/delivery-frequency/ http://500years.royalmailgroup.com/gallery/delivery-frequenc... In the UK it was up to 12 times / day in cities!
- ghaff 6y agoTo some degree, I'm sure it was a plot device but 19th century English novels often depended on rapid/same-day communications via letter at least in the environs of London.
- eru 6y agoCompare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Penny_Post https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Penny_Post
- hdjdbtbgwjsn 6y agoThat was considered standard then in London. Royal Mail even had its own underground railways in London.
- Spooky23 6y agoIt was more in some places. My grandma and aunt would mail letters like IMs in 1930s NYC.
- golem14 6y agoRemember the USPS is rumored to have recently dismantled hundreds of sorting machines. Entirely possible that some old mail was jammed in there somehow. Also, cf. "Going Postal" by Terry Pratchett.
- organsnyder 6y agoI had that initial thought as well, but there's no way those machines are anywhere near a century old.
- akiselev 6y agoThe sorting machines themselves are certainly not, but the general infrastructure around them sure can be. The World's Most Mechanized Post Office video [1] was filmed circa 1959 and it shows a crazy level of industrialization in the DC facility. Conveyor belts were invented in 1901 or so and such systems can run for a very long time with proper maintenance - for centuries even, replacing everything but the frame. Given how slowly government usually moves, they must have built up to that scale over decades. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuvwoBb7gs4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuvwoBb7gs4
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agothe card is old enough to have been considered an antique in 1970, reinserted into the postal system, then gotten stuck in a "modern" sorting machine for another 50 years until ... TADA !!
- dstick 6y agoGNU Terry
- tjr 6y agoI do not have any data, but could easily imagine some post offices in small towns (say: Brandon, Iowa) have gone largely unchanged for a very long time.
- renewiltord 6y agoIf I can do that, then I'm going to get my tax return postmarked early and then just sit on it for a while.
- colejohnson66 6y ago“What do you mean you won’t pay me? Your requirement said postmarked by $date!”
- tartoran 6y agoThe story seems to be either to get clicks or to intentionally make the USPS look bad, perhaps it has something to do with the election. I bet most people didn't read this part and some of them really formed the conclusion the mail got lost for 100 years in the mail system after skimming over this article.
- takeda 6y agoMaybe as a joke, I doubt anyone would think that DeJoy is responsible for delaying mail for 100 years. Meanwhile I have significant less mail, and on mail that had a stamp I see it took them a week to deliver it (this is local mail, not international). Never seen I such issues with mail as long as I lived here.
- philwelch 6y agoThis is why it’s so important to measure p99 latency rather than maximum latency.
- cdbattags 6y agoThis! Thank you for your service to category theory! Comparisons like this are what is going to lead us into the next 100 years.
- vecter 6y agoThis user is not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Welch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Welch
- philwelch 6y agoHow do you know I’m not? To confirm though, I am indeed not that or any other mathematician and I can’t claim any credit for any contribution to category theory. I’m simply a programmer who knows a little bit about a few things, no one special :)
- Dylan16807 6y agoWell I suppose it's possible that your "about" line is completely fake, but in that case it sounds like you want people to go around thinking you're not him.
- vecter 6y agoGoing to the website on your profile made it immediately clear, but even without that confirmation, there's a much higher probability of you being a random programmer vs. a specific older mathematician.
- sethammons 6y agotrue, percentiles are important for telling you how your system is doing and how typical users experience it. However, I contend that you should also measure max latency, just that is is less important for understanding typical usage. But seeing your max go crazy can signal that there is something else in the stack that needs work. Silly example that I hit: max was consistently 2hr on something that p99'd at like 1min and p50'd at 2 seconds. Dug in. The 2hr was a default tcp timeout being tripped due to some connections not being properly returned to the pool. Fix the pool logic and max times came down into the few minute range. This also lowered p99.
- rafaelturk 6y agoI'm glad to see some improvement in the USPS
- justwalt 6y agoThat got an audible laugh out of me.
- TuringNYC 6y agoLike many office buildings in NYC, my employer's building had a system of air-pressured mail tubes. I understand (now) that they are kept in some cases as decoration, historical artifact, or due to the building being designated a historical monument (not sure if internals are covered (?). We didn't understand that as first, and several colleagues and I put postcards and some expense reports into them. I can see the postcard arriving 100 years later! This was Accenture, and at the time, original receipts were required. Luckily they made an exception on photocopied receipts when I explained what had happened.
- cpeterso 6y agoDo you know where the mail tubes sent your postcards and expense reports? Did they end up in some basement or were they lost in the tubes forever?
- TuringNYC 6y agoNot sure, but I was told that traditionally they had air pressure pushing them along. But that without air, they get stuck not far from where you dropped them. We were on the 17th floor IIRC, so i imagine they are stuck somewhere close below.
- codezero 6y agoTwo of my offices have had these and at both, we've had engineers constructing insane devices to retrieve things they dropped in :)
- 205guy 6y agoThere was also a discussion of mail chutes in old buildings a while ago, and many suffered from blockages (or being non-operational, as in your case). I could see someone finally clearing out a blockage during a renovation, then dropping the old letters in the mail. But the original article was a card written between families, so probably not in an office building. The flea-market theory from the article seems the most plausible.
- 6y ago
- thanatos519 6y agoIn 2120, we'll be reading "votes sent by mail delivered 100 years later".
- justaguyhere 6y agoYou're giving ideas to the GOP...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- trhway 6y agoThe post office will have time machine by then to get back and deliver on time and change the temporarily altered history. May be we already living in that alternative branch.
- JadeNB 6y ago> May be we already living in that alternative branch. You conjugated the future semiconditionally modified subinverted plagal past subjunctive intentional incorrectly.
- fuzzer37 6y agoI can't tell if this is a very elaborate grammar joke that I don't know enough to understand or a troll.
- JadeNB 6y ago> I can't tell if this is a very elaborate grammar joke that I don't know enough to understand or a troll. Neither! (Or, rather, it's DNA's very elaborate grammar joke that I stole.) http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/guide.html http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/guide.html
- fiftyacorn 6y agoIs this a distraction story from USPS?
- ghostbrainalpha 6y agoI like the scepticism! But the fact that the story was posted by the recipient of the post card, to a Facebook Group, and then only hit the news after going viral means it probably wasn't done by a PR company. Having done some of this "black hat PR" myself I can tell you that we don't typically cover our tracks that well. We almost always plant bullshit by going to the news outlets themselves, or paying a blogger to put up an article on BI, Forbes, of HuffPo. On a completely unrelated note, have you guys heard Amazon is hiring 33,000 new employees with a compensation package average of 150k? Just to help with unemployment during this time of crisis. Pretty cool of them to do that.
- jacobush 6y agoThey can afford it, with all the subsidies the get from the USPS when delivering to non-urban places. Amazon is a cancer in Congress.
- salemh 6y agoA blog post with your experience -even heavily redacted- would be interesting on the black-hat PR/public opinion swaying as a separate topic if you ever feel inclined.
- hal9000-tng 6y agoah, completely unrelated!
- klyrs 6y agoThis kind of story is fairly normal in my 40-year existence. USPS has a strong culture to deliver the mail, come hell or high water. Sometimes old mail gets found, and they deliver it anyway, because that's the principled thing to do. Of course, USPS has been politicized to an unreasonable degree, so folks are reading it in that context.
- m0zg 6y agoZuckerberg was quoted as saying: "What we and the other media need to start doing is preparing the American people that there is nothing illegitimate about this election taking additional hundred years to make sure all the votes are counted"
- dumbfounder 6y agoWe got one 50 years old a few years ago, but it was a return to sender because the street no longer existed. It happened to be a Christmas card right around Christmas.
- amir734jj 6y agoLast year I bought a house and moved out of my apartment. So far I have received 1) two stimulus checks for the two deceased owners of the house 2) funeral home bills 3) family photos they sent and got returned
- null_deref 6y agoThe third one really got me sad, did you successfully sent it back to its intended recipient?
- jacobush 6y agoBeyond the great unknown?
- IncRnd 6y agoHow would you do that, burn them?
- dstick 6y agoI think the correct word would be: sacrifice ;-)
- IncRnd 6y agoYes. Thank you. You are of course correct, and I appreciate you pointing that out to me. Make them holy and sacred.
- Izkata 6y agoI read it as the sender died (and they were returned to sender) but the recipients may still be alive somewhere.
- Jeaye 6y agoThis is a good example of why eventual consistency is a weak guarantee.
- hsnewman 6y agoAnti Post office propaganda?
- marktangotango 6y agoI used to be in the habit of emailing myself links to read later. I once had an email arrive at my gmail account 3 months after I sent it. That's like what 1000 years in internet time? :D
- IncRnd 6y agoEmail is literally a store-and-forward technology!
- hk__2 6y agoThere are a couple services that allow you to write a letter to your future self and get it delivered in X months/years.
- slig 6y agofutureme.org. I remember writing some about 10 years ago.
- rkagerer 6y agoI had a substitute high school teacher one day who made us all write letters to ourselves, then sent them to us like 20 years later long after we'd forgotten about it. It was amazing!
- curiousgal 6y agoDid you achieve all of what you hoped you'd do?
- hk__2 6y agoI think it would be a great self-introspection exercise to “respond” to this letter. You don’t even need a letter- just write to your past self and tell him/her what you’ve achieved, what you’re proud of, what you wish you’d done differently, what you’re unsure about for the future.
- credit_guy 6y agoI call shenanigans. There is a bar code on the bottom part of the postcard. It has 65 bars. This is consistent with the Intelligent Mail Barcode that was introduced in 2013. Prior to that there were different barcode standards, Postnet and Planet, but neither had 65 bars, the highest number of bars that Postnet had was 62, and they were short and long only. This barcode here has 4 types of bars: short, long up, long down, and long up-and-down; again this is consistent with the IMB code. By the way, barcodes were introduced to encode ZIP codes, and ZIP codes were introduced in 1963. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Mail_barcode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Mail_barcode
- julianlam 6y ago> We did reach out to the post office for comment and a spokesperson told me, “In most cases these incidents do not involve mail that had been lost in our network and later found. What we typically find is that old letters and postcards – sometimes purchased at flea markets, antique shops and even online – are re-entered into our system. The end result is what we do best – as long as there is a deliverable address and postage, the card or letter gets delivered.” A bit of a sensationalized headline. Just an old postcard, the postmark is recent.
- tantalor 6y ago> sensationalized headline No, the postmark is 1920 according to the article. See https://i.imgur.com/r8HqDc2.png https://i.imgur.com/r8HqDc2.png
- toby- 6y agoCan it not have multiple postmarks? The stamp at the top (which says 1920) and the modern barcode underneath?
- kube-system 6y agoThe barcode is not a postmark, it's a machine readable version of the address
- uses 6y ago> We did reach out to the post office for comment and a spokesperson told me, “In most cases these incidents do not involve mail that had been lost in our network and later found. What we typically find is that old letters and postcards – sometimes purchased at flea markets, antique shops and even online – are re-entered into our system. The end result is what we do best – as long as there is a deliverable address and postage, the card or letter gets delivered.”
- GekkePrutser 6y agoIt was addressed to Marty McFly!
- JazzXP 6y agoI'm surprised I had to scroll this far for that comment. First thing I thought of with the headline.
- mindcrime 6y agoI ordered a package of plastic worms (for bass fishing) back in June. They were shipped from Texas on 06-21, and as of today (09-10), they still haven't arrived (Chapel Hill, NC). Yet strangely enough, the postal service tracking system updated the status about a month ago, from "In Transit" to "In Transit - Arriving Late". Derp, derp. Anyway, I've pretty much given up on them at this point, but I wonder if like 100 years from now, or at some other arbitrary point in time down the line, somebody who lives here after me is going to find a package of plastic worms in the mailbox...
- windyaskew 6y agoIt would be fun down the line to hear "Wait, Amazon used to sell physical things like this??"
- starpilot 6y agoI had a small package in customs in Chicago for three months recently. Seems to be the norm in these times.
- mindcrime 6y agoYeah, I mean, I could understand something coming through customs. But this particular package was something manufactured and shipped in Texas. I did recently have a rather long wait for a book that was shipped from, aaah... I think it was either Germany or England. I think it took about a month and a half to arrive. Of course I understand that COVID has had a major impact, but the one from Texas still annoys me. I mean, c'mon... over two months from TX to NC? Give me a break. :-(
- jagged-chisel 6y agoYou get your postmark from the originating post office. If I drop something in the mail here, the local post office marks the item (verifying & invalidating the postage), perhaps encodes the address in the barcode at the bottom (I don't recall whether that's centralized work or not), and sends it along its merry way to the destination. The postmark is obviously printed by a modern (impact?) printer. Why the post office would accept a mailing with incorrect postage for current times is notable - maybe someone making the call just shrugged it off an allowed it to pass.
- usefulcat 6y agoSometimes they don’t notice that the postage is wrong, or even missing entirely. I’ve heard stories of people drawing “stamps” on letters to see if it would pass, and I know I’ve successfully mailed a letter without putting a stamp on it at all (by accident, and was surprised that it was delivered).
- jameson 6y ago> In most cases these incidents do not involve mail that had been lost in our network and later found. What we typically find is that old letters and postcards – sometimes purchased at flea markets, antique shops and even online – are re-entered into our system. The end result is what we do best – as long as there is a deliverable address and postage, the card or letter gets delivered.
- trentnix 6y ago“We have been trying to reach you about your car insurance...”
- js2 6y agoYears ago for my sister's 30th birthday, I did a fun project involving the USPS. I wanted to send her the message "Happy Belated Thirtieth Birthday!", which is 30 characters, via postcards, one character per postcard. I found 30 post offices in unique places throughout the U.S. (For example, I found a town that had the same name as her given name in Illinois. I found another with my name, etc.) I used Zazzle to print a custom post card for each location with a picture of the location on one side, and a large block letter on the other. I just did a Google image search at the time to find photos of the location. Here's the image I used for "Truth or Consequences, NM": https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Truth_or_Consequences_NM_-_post_office.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Truth_or... I then hand wrote a message on each postcard that started with the block letter. This was because she'd be receiving the postcards one-by-one and I didn't want her to realize right away that a message was being spelled out. It would seem like a postcard I might send her from that location if I'd actually been there. I also found a set of 50-state stamps the USPS had previously issued on eBay, and used the correct state's stamp for its postcard. Finally, I round-tripped each postcard through its respective post office by mailing it inside an envelope addressed to the postmaster at that post office along with a note to the post master: Dear Postmaster: I am mailing my sister 30 postcards from 30 towns for her 30th birthday. I have enclosed a postcard, which I ask be hand-cancelled with a postmark from your town. To protect the postcard from machine cancels in its journey through the mail system, I have enclosed a stamped envelope addressed to my sister in which to seal and mail the postcard. Thank you very much for your time! I wasn't sure if this would work, but damn if she didn't get all 30 postcards each properly postmarked. I dropped them all in the mail in NC. Some went as far as Alaska and Hawaii. She received them in Miami. I think she got the first one within a few days and the rest dribbled in over the next two weeks. Edit: here they are after she received them all: https://ibb.co/YQfx4jZ https://ibb.co/YQfx4jZ
- ZainRiz 6y agoWow, this is a great story! Do you have pictures of the post cards by any chance? And how long did it take her to realize what the message was?
- 6y ago
- dozzman 6y ago> It was an old Halloween postcard Are we sure this is not the plot to an upcoming horror film?
- seizethecheese 6y agoA lot of jokes on here about this being an improvement for USPS, or a distraction. The truth is that USPS performance has improved dramatically over the last two weeks. You just haven't heard about that because there is very little appetite for good news. See here: https://carriers.shipbob.com/#lp-pom-block-1909 https://carriers.shipbob.com/#lp-pom-block-1909 Our company (bottomless.com, YC W19) uses USPS to do real time delivery and keeps a very close eye on arrival times. Our own internal arrival time data has normalized considerably as well.
- takeda 6y agoIt is still worse than it was. Yesterday I got local mail that was mailed a week ago and most of the time my mailbox is empty. Their Informed Delivery service (where I can see what mail is being delivered to me) now says my address is not covered, when it worked for me 2 months ago (not sure when it was disabled, since recently I started worrying about lost mail). Before it all started, USPS actually operated really well, there were times I got packages faster than through UPS (don't really use FedEx). Actually you can see that from your site they were on average 2 days, when typically everyone was expecting 3 days.
- devy 6y agoAm I the only one that think that might be a hoax? How is the post card be preserved for a century without significant damages to it? Moisture, mold and other nature situation would have destroyed it in a few decades. I really want to hear the back story of this story. Also, the address still EXISTS after a hundred years? No rezoning, no town name change or street name change? Many rural houses built in 1920 would not have survive 100 years without major overhauls.
- wheybags 6y ago≥ Brittany says if she can’t find the family she’s gonna try and get it put into the museum in Belding. Wtf sort of professional journalist writes "gonna" in an article on a news site?
- judge2020 6y agoMight be verbatim, but then again there are no quotes. This is indeed local news so actual writing and proofreading skills might be lesser than those of national outlets.
- quickthrower2 6y agoI wonder, in 2100 will there be a UDP packet delivered from 100 years ago?
- paledot 6y agoNope, but there'll be a TCP packet that's been re-sending over and over for the past 100 years.
- quickthrower2 6y agoBut we’ll still be using IPv4 so all good!
- worker767424 6y agoSometimes I wonder what we've lost from not writing letters and using Facebook. Reading this, maybe not all that much, and the long-distance relationships we maintain have always been superficial.
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoSpeaking of USPS: I shipped a package from Japan to my home in San Francisco, 3 months ago. The package arrived two days ago. I opened it... And realized the content has been "replaced" with junk books of (I assume) a similar weight of the original. The content was a few ceramic plates, a few books, some tea - nothing particularly expensive, but these were items that we bought during our stay in Japan. I hate this. I hate the person or persons that have done this. I pretty much feel my own person has been violated. Also, knowing USPS, I'm certain that nothing will ever happen to these THIEVES, and that there will be no easy way for me to force them to open an investigation. Sorry for the venting... But I somehow had to express this inner rage somewhere, and when I saw this thread I couldn't resist.
- Spooky23 6y agoYou would be surprised. Call the postal inspector office in your area. They take mail theft very seriously.
- dawnerd 6y agoDid you report it to customs? That's almost certainly where it got swapped.
- kiwijamo 6y agoWhy assume it was USPS? It would have been handled by a number of agencies on its journey. The customs one mentioned by another person seems to be another plausible reason.
- hirsin 6y agoAs others have mentioned - USPS is extremely interested in mail fraud and other crimes, arresting over 5k people a year. They handle reports like this all the time.
- eusebius 6y agoI worked in the mail room of a dorm while in college. Part of the daily routine was mindlessly marking things "return to sender," rarely noticing the postmark date. In one instance (this was 2013) we received a pretty beat up piece of mail that was clearly a Valentine's Day card. The postmark date was "02 Feb 1999." Being very intrigued, I found a CV that seemed to belong to the recipient (the CV indicated that they attended the university around the same time) and emailed them. They expressed their gratitude and mentioned that the card was from their now deceased grandparents. I of course forwarded the mail to them. I've always wondered what kind of journey that piece of mail had... I imagine part of it was stuck behind a desk somewhere.
- john1298 6y agoPepsi Vs. Coke Which Beverage do you Prefer, https://bit.ly/35luAgW https://bit.ly/35luAgW
- AniseAbyss 6y agoI read an interesting article on the USPS. They aren't just a threat to the US elections, Europeans who live in the US and want to vote are screwed as well. Next day delivery is not something that is guaranteed in every country.
- janvdberg 6y agoFun, but this is most likely fake. I.e. this card has not been laying at the postoffice for 100 years. In this case it seems particularly clear: look at the glue markings in the middle of the card. This indicates this postcard probably has been sitting in a collectors' album for quite some time, before someone thought of removing it and pulling a joke. This sort of thing happens all the time by people who post the card after it has been sitting in a collection for some time. Since it is a valid card, the post office will deliver it nonetheless. That's what they do! (Here's a Dutch example: https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/kerstkaart-na-ruim-halve-eeuw-alsnog-bezorgd~aefe43da/ https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/kerstkaart-na-ruim-halve-eeuw-a...) Disclaimer: I checked this with an acclaimed philatelic collector.
- wesllen 6y agoWormate