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In the 70s I worked in the mailroom of a college that had 1500 teachers and administrators whose departments I had to learn (for $3.75/hour). We'd get those big
by tomcam 4y ago
In the 70s I worked in the mailroom of a college that had 1500 teachers and administrators whose departments I had to learn (for $3.75/hour). We'd get those big plastic boxes full of mail, and just know that Garrido was in Athletics, Loftus was in Psychology, etc. We'd throw the mail in the slots, then rubber band them together, pack into the electric golf cart, and deliver them. I still remember dozens of names and their departments. Also Dominique, one of the receptionists in Social Studies. Sigh.
Anyway, my cousin lives in a small Virginia town, current pop. 38,000 but closer to 5,000 back then. She has a slightly unusual first name. About 25 years ago I guessed it was rare enough that whoever threw mail in the town would remember it. So I sent the mail to Dorothy, Gloucester, VA (not her real name). No street address, no zip code. It got to her with apparently no delay.
I tried the same thing about 5 years ago but included her last name and the zip code for Gloucester. It never got to her, which makes perfect sense.
- unyttigfjelltol 4y agoI send a fair amount of mail to addresses very near where I drop the mail-- as in, in the same ZIP, if not almost the same mail route (but not at the actual post office). I'm constantly puzzled that a) it takes a few days to reach the addressee no matter how close you drop the letter to the destination address and b) when I check, local mail is being postmarked at a regional center fifteen miles away....
- ianai 4y agoWhat’s with the ellipsis,”….”? You’re using the completely wrong system to deliver a message at a distance it’s not meant to optimize. Sure maybe that would have been routine in the 1920s when almost all business was local, but those days are gone.
- unyttigfjelltol 4y agoAh, don't you need to know the use case before you condemn the solution? Inefficient yes, but still the best solution for this edge case. The ellipses were a lightly informed nod to the explanations offered by other commenters.
- ianai 4y agoI’m not condemning the solution. I’m condemning the implied critique of a system that you admit worked even in your edge case.
- unyttigfjelltol 4y agoI was not critiquing the USPS. The parent comment observed that the USPS no longer can complete delivery on a partial address. I was suggesting an explanation, i.e., sorting no longer is done by people with the local context necessary to complete such a delivery. That was confirmed by other comments, and indeed suggested by the article.
- zrail 4y agoBoth of your observations are due to constant relentless cost optimization within the postal system. Local post offices, for the most part, don't postmark mail at all. Everything gets batched to the regional processing center where it goes through the big automated sorting machines. I seem to remember a "local only" box in the town where I grew up but that hasn't been a thing for decades now.
- hhh 4y agoFWIW, early 2000s where I lived had a local only chute. When I was <10 I always wanted to put the letters in the box.
- devilbunny 4y agoA friend lived in a smaller town where mail was processed in the nearest larger city (in a neighboring state). But, if you needed something sent to (most of) the rest of the state, it was faster to have it processed in a different city in the other direction. They had a specific drop box for that, which cut delivery from two days to one. I, living in the second city, was stuck with having my mail routed out of state to get to him.
- jagged-chisel 4y agoKnowing that our mail passes through the regional processing center before returning to the local area, we expect about three days if we mail a neighbor. Post offices around us have two mail slots when you walk in to drop mail in the box: local only, and everywhere else. Presumably they have (once had?) separate localized processing for those in the “local” bin. Because of post office closures and reduced hours, I think everything is just passed off to the regional facility for the last few years. Another interesting discovery: I live about 3mi from my parents. They’re over the line in another county. My post office services them, but when I still lived in their house, all our local government business (schools, taxes and whatnot) was in the county seat about 15mi further away from the serving post office, closer to the next regional facility further south. If we ever dropped mail, say from mom to her mother, in that town, it took at least an extra day because it had to hit two regionals before getting to grandmother’s local.
- garrettgrimsley 4y agoI have previously worked for USPS and can help clear up what is happening. The mail carrier and their assigned station (Post Office) should be thought of only as the ingress/egress of the postal system. It would be wrong to say that no sorting happens there, but the type of sorting that doesn't happen there is why your mail is being postmarked at a plant (regional center) fifteen miles away. I'll use the location that I worked at as an example. In Wilmington, NC, once your carrier returns to the station, they drop your letter into a collection bin. This collection bin is driven to Fayetteville, NC, where it is then processed via OCR. After being OCR'd it has a machine-readable bar-code, and will be sorted for delivery to a local station. The machinery involved in the OCR and sorting process is larger than any of the local stations I worked at. Additionally, almost all of the mail pieces that I delivered were intercity, not intracity. Your use case is the exception, not the rule. There are many exceptions and corner cases to what I described, but that's what the process looks like for most mail pieces. Locating the scanning and sorting machinery at a hub rather than each individual spoke makes sense. UPS, where I currently work, has some minor differences, but the hub and spoke model is largely the same.
- Symbiote 4y agoAt some point in the past, the balance of intracity vs intercity mail would have been different. Now, utility bills come from some distant office, as do letters from banks, and we don't send invitations very often. X years ago, bills were sent by closer companies, the bank was local and it was polite to invite someone to dinner by letter. With that, it would have made sense to separate local and other mail as soon at the postman brought it to the post office.
- windowsrookie 4y agoDid you include your $3.75/hour pay to imply it was a low salary? $3.75 in 1975 is $20.97 today. A quick search shows starting pay for a mail carrier today is $16/hour. The federal minimum wage is 7.25/hour which would be $1.3/hour in 1975. You were actually paid very well at $3.75/hour compared to today.
- mvandermeulen 4y agoThanks for this, it’s always good to have up to date information. What did you think of the rest of the story?
- windowsrookie 4y agoThe story made me think of two things. First is my school, they had a huge shelving unit divided in ~4"x4" squares on the wall where all of the employee mail was placed. Second was a story I read on hacker news fairly recently. There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area.
- PretzelPirate 4y agoWas it the Costa Rica story?
- windowsrookie 4y agoYes! That is the story.
- owenmarshall 4y ago> There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area. There may be more than one, but Costa Rica is definitely addressed this way. A hotel I stayed in was 70 meters behind the church of Saint somebody, there was a great restaurant who was “near the old tree” (and everyone knew which one!). It was impressive.
- yowzadave 4y agoA funny story went around the internet last year about a guy in Northern Ireland who received a letter that only had his first (common in Ireland) name, the town he grew up in, and a rambling description of his life story: https://mobile.twitter.com/weefeargal/status/1479069076144234497 https://mobile.twitter.com/weefeargal/status/147906907614423...
- tzs 4y agoWhen I was an undergraduate mail to "tzs, 1-59, 91126" would have probably got to me. 91126 was the zip code for Caltech undergraduate housing, which would have been sufficient to get the letter to the Caltech post office. The Caltech post office would have recognized 1-59 as the building code for Ricketts House and put it in the bundle of mail for Ricketts. The carrier there would have put it in the "T" box in the mailbox array in Ricketts lounge.
- Scoundreller 4y agoLived in a house that had its own postal code in the country it was in. Tried sending a letter to the postal code, It didn’t make it :(
- tomcam 4y agoThose dedicated zip codes are increasingly rare but def a hidden superpower you wielded appropriately