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Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

Some brilliant examples of postal detective work in Ireland documented here https://www.quora.com/Can-you-send-mail-in-Ireland-with-the-....

   Petra Kindler and Donal Moore
   Unfortunately I forgot the street name
   but it's near a street named *Cul de Sac*
   The beautiful city of Waterford,
   well known for its kindly postmen
   IRELAND

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My favourite was the one addressed simply “Gobshites”, with no further details.

It was successfully and correctly delivered to the Dáil (the lower house of the Irish parliament).

ETA: source —- https://www.her.ie/amp/lol/unbelievable-this-letter-made-it-...

That is legitimately spectacular.

Non-AMP link: https://www.her.ie/lol/unbelievable-this-letter-made-it-all-...

I wonder how they determined it was for that pack of gobshites, and not the band[1]. Penmanship? Cheery stamp?

[1] https://www.thegobshites.com/

Attitude? I’d imagine a fan would be more careful with the address. Someone who addresses a letter with “Gobshites” is likely pissed off at something.

Fair point.

Saw someone on a canal forum in the UK recently who documented how they'd received a letter addressed simply [Name of Boat] [Name of town they were in a few weeks earlier ] via a combination of a postman and a boater who knew which direction they were headed in.

Just as well their boat wasn't called Kingfisher or Meander...

I've had An Post deliver some that weren't just partially addressed, but wildly inaccurately so.

The most notable example was addressed to "correct name, house number (no street), wrong city entirely". It arrived two days late, unopened.

I like to imagine there's a little old lady sat in a sorting office somewhere, who simply knows everyone's business. Everyone's.

I personally received a letter to: "Fergal Reid, Longford, Ireland", in the late 90s. Ireland had no postcodes at the time.

I lived in a small village on the edge of a county called Longford; my name isn't that unique in Ireland.

The funny thing about the story, is that the letter was posted in the Philippines, and was physical spam mail, trying to hook me into some sort of scam. They had pulled the partial address from a domain name record. No idea how the economics of that worked!

There was a submission on here a while back with someone using weird addresses etc. One required a cross word to be filled in and it got delivered.

came into the comments to post this, or see if anyone had. couldn't find the URL using the sitewide search.

https://www.meversusanpost.com/

I don't think that was the one. I'm fairly sure it was based in the UK.

I found this

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/6226641.stm

But that isn't it either.

There's also the fun story of the letter addressed via a map, to "a horse farm with an icelandic/danish couple and 3 kids and a lot of sheep!" - https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-37233913

I correctly received a similarly-addressed letter, and was fairly impressed that it made its way to me.

Mate of mine used to have conversations with the postman on postcards that while while they were addressed to us ALL the text was directed towards the postman. It's been over 30 years. But they'd read something like; "Hi Mr.Postman, hope you're having a good day. The weather here is quite lovely. I've been drinking quite a bit. How's your rounds going? Hope it hasn't been raining too bad? Have you broken in the new boots yet? I hear you're getting new bicycles?" Then the answers would be written in tiny writing in between the questions.

Since Ireland got what we're calling eircodes (post codes for Ireland) we can now have a house level address in 7 chars. So mine is Xxx XXxx I really must try and send myself something with JUST that on the label?! With a wee apology on the back for taking the piss.

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