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Back when Australia decided to require street addresses my grandmother decided to simply ignore it. I suppose this was the late 50s or early 60s. She continue
by gumby 2y ago
Back when Australia decided to require street addresses my grandmother decided to simply ignore it. I suppose this was the late 50s or early 60s. She continued to use her house name on all letters and official forms well into the late 1990s until she was old and decrepit enough to need to move into a home (she was in her late 90s herself). As far as I could tell everything continued to work fine, and I just sent letters to her at "Riccarton", Aldgate, SA.
Australia being Australia there are plenty of far more sketchy addresses in the more rural areas.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> my grandmother decided to simply ignore it I've tested sending letters to my name, small town, state. C'est tout. They deliver. Granted, I'm in a town of 10,000 with no postal service to the address: you need a P.O. box or private mailbox. Still, neat a letter will route correctly from New York to Wyoming with just a name and town.
- gumby 2y agoThis actually works fine in the USA where I live now. In the few letters I actually send I usually simply write the person's or company's name and the post code (zip code). This postal trivia is becoming more amusing all the time -- I check my mailbox once every 6-8 weeks, or even less, and rarely have more than one or two items in that time. I get the impression that nobody bothers to use the postal service for anything important any more.
- Kon-Peki 2y agoThe postal service routing system developed into a highly fault-tolerant system, by necessity. You may intentionally omit required information, but the system doesn't know that. It could also have been obscured, damaged, etc. The machines try as hard as they can to get the letter as close to the destination as possible and then a human takes over. Unless your local postal carrier is a jerk, it is highly likely to succeed. Even in NYC/LA/Chicago: the postal carrier has a small area they are responsible for, they are just as likely to know all the names as a postal carrier in a small town.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Even in NYC/LA/Chicago: the postal carrier has a small area they are responsible for, they are just as likely to know all the names as a postal carrier in a small town A full name and zip code are also frequently unique.
- rightbyte 2y ago> I get the impression that nobody bothers to use the postal service for anything important any more. Try to send invitations to parties by email and see how many actually reads their mailbox filled to the brink with spam. I want everything important from companies by snail mail. Friends etc. could use sms, telephone or snail mail. People don't seem to read private e-mails that often and a lot are missed. Me included. Note, I am referring to private correspondence. At work I check my email properly.
- koliber 2y agoI once sent a letter to the Polish embassy in New York City. I got the street number wrong. It came back many weeks later stamped as undeliverable because the address does not exist. I remember reading or watching something ages ago about how the US postal service has a special office for deciphering non-standard addresses to ensure delivery. I think they were on a company retreat when my letter was passing through.
- mattpallissard 2y agoSame in the US. I technically have a street address but all of my paperwork just has plat map/parcel information. Sort of a pain when trying to validate your address. No mail delivery still. And when places won't ship to a PO box the post office workers have a few hacks you can use for addressing that'll get your mail where it needs to go. Plus it's a small town, they learn who's mail goes in what box pretty quickly.