Postman delivers 'somewhere in Sheffield' parcel | Hacker News Reader

Postman delivers 'somewhere in Sheffield' parcel

bbc.com

81 pointsblacktulip108 comments

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...

wasn't trump a winner of cheapest (fake) billionaire by trying to cash a $1 check, or something like that?

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.

That's hilarious. I doubt he did that personally though. He probably has an assistant who sorts through his mail.

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.

There is a saying: Look after the pence and the pounds look after themselves.

how does that square with this saying: "penny wise, pound foolish"?

Often a proverb will have an opposite proverb (though the example you give isn't a proverb). For example “too many chefs spoil the broth” and “many hands make light work”

sancho panza in don quixote took this to a ludicrous extreme. they're known today as "sanchismos".

The ideal amount of help then clearly rests somewhere between "too many" and "many" :)

Though maybe the proverbs are not exactly opposites. One is about the quality of the outcome, the other is the speed in getting there. Perhaps that's the lesson.

"Pound foolish" is not a necessary outcome of "penny wise", in this saying, but "the pounds will take care of themselves" is. Taking care of the pennies works when one is, at worst, "pound neutral". But being "pound foolish" is an additional condition in the saying, which is not accounted for in the "take care of the pennies" saying.

Project management version: look after the molehills and the mountains take of themselves

I have a hard time believing Trump opened his own mail and went to the bank to deposit a $1 check. He surely has people for that and they did exactly what they were paid to do.

It’s kinda rude to not cash a check, it leaves the money in limbo, see Seinfeld episode, and I’m sure Simpsons has done it.

> mail with just a name and zip code tended to get to its destination

Is that unexpected? In Britain a (real but random) address like

  36
  B30 1QR

is sufficient. This format is most useful for a return address. Adding the street name would be helpful to the postman.

Addresses that receive a lot of post usually have their own postcode. "SW1A 2AA" is a minimum complete address for a letter to the Prime Minister's office (10 Downing Street).

5 digit US zip codes are pretty course, thousands and thousands of people each.

The newer 9 digit codes are something like the delivery route for the address (I'm not sure that is exactly right, but they are much finer grained).

Putting just my house number and ZIP code into Google maps just got me the outline of the ZIP code area. Using just the ZIP and ZIP+4 didn't improve the results. Google doesn't quite know everything yet. ;)

I'm aware that "house number + postcode" is often sufficient to uniquely identify a property -- it works for my house, for example -- but I've wondered if this is always the case. When I enter a postcode into my satnav, it sometimes offers a choice of several street names, which seems to imply there might be duplicate house numbers within the single postcode. But I've never tried to confirm this -- do you know?

Not always. At my old postcode someone had recently built a block of flats not quite large enough to get its own postcode. The postcode also contained an older block of flats and some houses. We were flat 9 but the postcode contained two flat 9s and a house number 9.

It's not always correct, no.

Fortunately there's another identifier - the Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) - that exists to, well, uniquely identify every property in the UK.

Currently it's proprietary but from July 2020 it will be available for use under the Open Government License.[0]

[0] https://mhclgdigital.blog.gov.uk/2020/04/02/unique-property-...

By "number" I meant "name or number", since some buildings don't have a number. A flat number is obviously also necessary if applicable.

A previous discussion on this, in 2013, tried to give some examples. None of them seem to break the rule, since "Pleasant Cottage" and so on are building names. If there's a counterexample, Wikipedia should be updated.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5625027

In the US, that's actually kinda surprising to me. Even in the suburb where I grew up, where there's no obvious overall grid system and instead the streets tend to meander around, parallel streets in the same neighborhood tended to share a lot of numbers.

I think they are giving all houses a number now, most houses around me (south west uk) have a name and a number now, where they all used to have names.

My house has a number, but for some reason it's listed under the "name" of my house - no end of confusion.

Yes I had an address that had a duplicate.

I think the other address was supposed to have an East before the street name, but when they left that off I got (some of?) their mail.

Should have figured out my +4 and tried that.

The UK postcode system is not some magic hash that can resolve to a street name. Instead it’s a database maintained by Royal Mail that’s updated when a new postcode or street is created. This would explain why your sat-nav doesn’t know about newer addresses as its database hasn’t been updated.

You should have gone with:

Willy Wonka, Chocolate Factory, B30 1JR

The US has a standard similar to that (we call it 'ZIP+4': a 4-digit addition to the earlier 5-digit ZIP code standard) but it didn't catch on in casual use. My ZIP+4 only contains a handful of addresses on my street. A street number and the ZIP+4 would be plenty enough to get a letter to me.

Institutional senders will usually use the ZIP+4 standard, but someone sending a letter in the mail typically will use the shorter 5-digit zip. Most people do not memorize the '+4' portion of their ZIP code.

My 5 digit zip code has about 8,000 addresses in it.

In the US, we have ZIP+4, which appends an additional four digits to the five-digit ZIP code. It's mainly used by bulk mailers, as part of qualifying for reduced postage rates.

Like the British postcode, important addresses have their own ZIP+4. E.g., 20500-0001, 20500-0002, and 20500-0003 refer, respectively, to the President, the First Lady, and the White House in general.

yes when I was in London i always wondered why everyone was obsessed with putting postcodes in on Google Maps (rather than the street), till i realized how accurate it was in locating an address.

well in the UK postcodes are pretty specific to a few houses or even a single property, so using that and a name is sufficient. But in other countries the postcode only specifies the province or suburb.

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!"

I'm a PI doing some PSI. and we're fresh out of rain, sleet or hail.

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.

There’s another reason for postal services to go the proverbial extra mile: they are absolutely in the trust business.

Yeah, I once had a package go missing in a postal hub that was known for that (as in multiple people arrested multiple times) and it kinda put me off wanting to use USPS for a while after that. The trust is super important.

>> This is why I don't pay merchants for any sort of expedited delivery.

That depends on the difference between ground vs. air delivery. I usually pay expedited shipping if I expect it to convert a 2-3 week ground delivery into a 1-3 day delivery by air.

Yes, some companies offer "normal" vs. "expedited", with either choice being shipped by ground. In that case, I agree that shipping expedited ground–especially if it's within state–is designed to rip off those who don't known any better.

well planes keep flying, the logistic chain will keep going. apart from time there's no reason not to put packages on the next flight back, no matter how small.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wonder how much less wasted paper I would get if the cost went up 10x... I would hazard a guess that 95-98% of my mail is spam, and usually not for local businesses.

I had never thought of it in those terms but come to think of it... (dons economist hat) yes... this is likely one of the few scenarios in which a higher price might actually drive up utility (and not the other way around, where market conditions of low competition combined with high utility get exploited by monopolists to drive up price). Very interesting, thank you for that insight. The higher price would make it more exclusive and thus drain the cesspool.

It’s a bit of an environmental nightmare when you think of how much material is used in creating dumb junk mail, how much carbon is dumped into atmo from the movement, all for it to go _directly_ into the bin when it arrives. Even if you say it’s recycled (is it??) it was unnecessary. Even if you say there was a plane/truck headed there anyway (was there?) it was unnecessary. Physical junk mail is a wasteful, _wasteful_ exercise that I would not be sorry to see curbed.

The issue is that spammers will just have someone who is not a post officer deliver their spam.

There was a similar method for email spam, hashcash where you needed to include some string derived from the message and recipient and some random characters you choose such that it will gag to some number with some amount of 0s at the start. Like bitcoin, the idea was that the cost of computing all the hashes would be prohibitive for mass spamming. It never caught on and I guess webmail would have been more expensive to set up if it had.

A system I would like would be one where there is a mechanism to return post if you don’t want it (rather than if it was sent to the wrong address) and the sender must cover the cost of recycling the material and some extra fee to make them not want their post to be unwanted. This would have to apply regardless of how the post was delivered.

If you live in a major city, you probably already get gobs of that friggin spam rubber-banded to your front door knob anyway. I find it in my mailbox, on my doorknob, on my door step, sometimes on the windshield wiper of my jeep.

Every now and then you'll find a super ambitious realtor or whatever that fedex overnights you something too.

In some ways I completely agree, but if you ever have to start sending larger volumes of stuff (especially parcels, especially international parcels, and especially international parcels to areas outside north America and the EU) then getting things to consistently arrive where they should in a reasonable time frame takes a lot of effort.

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).

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".

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.

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-a...)

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.

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.

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.)

Agreed, and anecdotally, we live in a very large US city and know our postman and our UPS delivery guy. It's been extremely helpful on more than one occasion, he even personally texted me when I wasn't home to say he could come by later. I always love chatting with them on the stoop.

In some European countries, it used to be a vocation, and there used to be a choice being made for the postman job to be a meaningful one. I know first hand a postman who works longer hours for free because he believes it's his duty to keep performing the whole social aspect of his job. He'll help older, illiterate people send and read mail, and won't pass the opportunity for a daily chat with the people who need it.

When the Belgian postal service was privatized, the productivity of workers doubled (or so I've heard). But I don't think the efficiency of the whole logistics sector benefited from it. Some businesses are natural monopolies, and no optimization and mistreatment of workers are going to make up for turning one dense delivery round performed by a lazy postman into several ones performed by overworked gig economy delivery workers.

It's depressing that there's so much pressure to run everything down to the wire.

Pretty much all new communities (within like the last 10 years) where I am get the centralized “community mail boxes”. Pretty hard to get to know your carrier that way.

I think this depends a lot on the area. In a minor city, the post is likely to be the same guy delivering letters every day for a few blocks. I guess you can get used to it and it's not too terrible a job.

All the letters (tax, benefits, work, bank, bills) across thousands of households and a few businesses must be sustaining a permanent job. There is still a ton of physical mails despite the adoption of emails.

However package delivery, by opposition to letters, is always a terrible job by nature.

We’re easily 70% junk mail at our house. I don’t know if junk mail is what underwrites the whole endeavor or if netted out the service would be far more efficient if that were eliminated (e.g. prices hiked to restrict 70% of gross tonnage moved).

> but for the government

only tangentially now. Royal Mail was privatised some years ago and is now just another courier business. Of course, people don't fully realise that and expect that it will carry out the same service it always has. The 'Universal Service Obligation' which provides that items will be delivered nationwide for the same price is only guaranteed until 2021. The CEO (Rico Back) who lives in Switzerland is a mercenary character so I would expect some changes after then.

note that in the US, the usps is not taxpayer-funded, as it's a private, but government-granted/-regulated, monopoly.

> Postal workers used to provide all sorts of informal, impromptu community services

There's even a Wiki page for one of the more discreet services.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milkman_joke

A friend used to deliver for usps, it’s way less pressured than UPS/FedEx. My understanding is they were given a block of paid time to deliver mail for a physical area, but no real expectation on total time taken. So you could get your route done in whatever duration you please and benefit accordingly. An interesting comparison can be made from my front window: USPS truck parks in front of my house, postman talks on phone for 10-15 mins, finally gets out, walks the residential neighborhood delivering mail all the while talking on phone, eventually returns to truck dicks around and leaves to next waypoint. UPS guy drives up, almost screeching to a halt, hops out, typically jogs up front walk with package, jogs back and takes off. Those guys are under a lot of pressure to deliver. I know the USPS guy who delivers to work office downtown, he’s super chill and pretty chatty (zero hurry). IOW, I think being a USPS delivery guy is still a rewarding, community focused job if you have the personality to handle the routine and like to get your steps in. Nobody’s looking over your shoulder, it’s Union, and with seniority you can choose your routes.

At the same time, I get annoyed at people getting so offended over the idea. Why should everyone have to work like the UPS guy? It sounds like the UPS driver's job is unsustainable and will either lead to an accident or injury at some point.

I don't know why everything has to be run down to the wire in the name of minimizing cost and maximizing profit.

> I don't know why everything has to be run down to the wire in the name of minimizing cost and maximizing profit.

There's no real "why" to it. It's not like any individual in a corporation chooses to run the corporation that way. It's rather an emergent effect of how corporations are legally structured (= shareholders electing/firing directors from the board based on quarterly results.) Directors are incentivized to pursue short-term profits during their tenure (such as by overworking employees), to enable them to enjoy the spoils of their positions for as long as possible.

A corporation can be "designed" intentionally to do something other than this (by e.g. choosing to create a benefit corporation; or even just by the founder retaining majority ownership and thus effectively "being" the board) but if you don't explicitly make a choice, being driven by quarterly profitability is what you get.

No - it's a natural product of competition, the pressure of which exists regardless of your legal structure. A sole proprietor running a courier service will need to differentiate himself relative to the other courier services, and the potential customers of such services place immense value on timeliness. Even if the courier were a non-profit, for it to be selected in favor of a competing service it would need to choose the basis upon which it wanted to compete and excel at it. USPS is sufficient for many things (e.g. 70% junk mail), but it's not a market competitor. Where it matters, there's a need to differentiate to survive. When our business needs something overnighted fast and reliably, it's always a private carrier for a reason that doesn't involve its legal structure.

In 2017, the French postal service ("La Poste") formalized this and made it a paid service to check up on elderly people ("Veiller sur mes parents"). Relatedly, La Poste was privatized in 2014.

There were some protests as it used to be done for free (so implicitely pro bono / sponsored by the state) for decades.

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.

That’s adorable! Was that in the UK?

Where do all of the letters mailed to "Santa Clause, North Pole" get sent?

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.

To Santa, at the North Pole, natch! :)

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_...

Maybe if you specifically address it there, but I think the USPS has a more formalized process to handle those in Anchorage now:

https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/letters-from-santa.htm

The Wikipedia page for Mojibake [0] used to have this image: 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

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.

Postal Experiments:

https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i4/p...

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!

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No idea if relevant in your situation, but postal companies are crazy good at mapping indicators to physical addresses.

F.ex. high-throughput OCR in the 1960s! [1]

To look at it another way, they were one of the first companies with access to big data-scale training sets (all mail flow!), albeit due to electronic storage limitations, persisted in the form of physical mail.

When you're running at a volume where a < 1% error rate means opening a new floor of manual sorters, you get pretty good at things. And it's a perfect environment for continuous improvement (customer abstracted from actual implementation, well specified process input and output interfaces, fallback plans for exception handling, and internal authority to experiment).

[1] US Postal Service OCR video from 1970: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V4LJs2ZoDR4

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. :-)

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.

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.

Good skills. I trust you were both lucky. Eire does have postcodes. https://www.eircode.ie/

Now where is that big tree:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.8623097,-8.3330293,3a,75y,...

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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. :)

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...

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.

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

4) https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

5) I guess 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.

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.

I think this is wildly inappropriate. To label something as "vital survival stuff" puts a moral burden on the postman to figure it out.

Oh I wouldn't sweat it. That's just British for "not vital for survival".

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