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Comment by NoboruWataya | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if it's being exaggerated for comedic purposes but it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author. Granted I don't send them very often but I wouldn't think much of it if I had to. But I guess younger people and particularly those in tech may genuinely never need a reason to send a letter (or, it seems, write an address by hand).

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Slightly alternate take: this post (and the fact that FSF still replies to paper mail) is about accessibility

Which changes as times change.

In the 90s, requiring access to the internet and an email address would have been exclusionary and decreased access.

Now, 30 years later, it's reversed and physical mail is difficult.

But from another perspective... the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible.

In the sense that the FSF wants to be the exact opposite of {install this vendor's parking app to pay for parking} + {get an email account with this particular provider to ensure your email goes through} + {install TicketMaster for access to venue} + {this site requires IE^H^HChrome} all the other mandatory third-party choices we're forced into.

Postal mail, for all its faults, is universally accessible by design. And continuing to support the most accessible method of communication is laudable!

Accessibility and convenience >> convenience

> the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible.

This is a good starting point, but if you have no barriers then you get abuse problems which is why email is terrible. I remember being horrified in the 90s about attempts to charge 1 cent per email. Now I long for a world where that actually happened.

You're paying that cent, but in the form of endless ads hijacking your consciousness.

you can still do some setup and access mail by using applications like thunderbird, which have no ads.

Or use an adblocker

Ironically, the amount of effort I expend dealing with spam from the postal service is much larger than the amount of effort I expend dealing with email.

I’m pretty sure I spend less than 5 minutes a week dealing with physical spam mail. I have a recycling bin right next to where the mail arrives and most days are 15 seconds of “these go into that bin unopened” and sometimes I have to open an envelope and glance at it to see if it’s something relevant to me.

Even with the best spam filtering on email, I’m well over 5 minutes a week of distraction from it.

And now imagine how easy dealing with email spam would be if the marginal fiscal cost was not 0 like physical spam. All the technology and tools available and less than 1% of the viable spam surface area

It's like the classic argument about IRC vs Discord. IRC is more convoluted to use, the clients are subpar, you need to set up a BNC to receive messages when offline, but Discord requires you to give up your phone number.

Some people find IRC less accessible, but I find having a phone number that I'm willing to give to a third party is a much more difficult requirement.

Don't forget the next part: whenever you point out that Discord requires you to give them your phone number, hundreds of Agent Smiths appear in the replies to say that actually you don't. Who are we to believe - the repliers, or our own lying eyes?

(The Agent Smith effect is something conspiracy theorists made up to explain why every time they show off their conspiracy theory in public, every single person around them suddenly gains the same opinion of them. I'm using it humourously)

The explanation is pretty simple: The most fervent users of discord also have overlap with the longest users of discord, and their account age and usage patterns means that discord's risk systems have never demanded a phone number from them.

> Who are we to believe - the repliers, or our own lying eyes?

Believe the repliers: I created an account in May 2024 and I have not added a phone number. Here's a screenshot from my settings: https://imgur.com/a/Q7kJpDv

But also, your eyes aren't lying to you: some servers require accounts to have confirmed phone number in order to join. So there is probably a lot of people who have had the experience of creating a Discord account, trying to join a server / accept an invite, and immediately seeing a "you must provide a phone number" prompt.

> is universally accessible by design

I disagree. It requires taking time out of business hours, and they don't pay you your salary while you line up multiple times for 30 minutes each. I've sometimes had to line up for 2 hours total (4 times) just to mail one thing. Once to ask "how do i mail this", once to ask for a pen (couldn't cut the line because a Karen wouldn't let me), once because I filled the wrong form, etc. Typical USPS experience

I mean it is the fallback method. The solution for the "I never heard of this internet thing, or something else is preventing me from finding the licence online" problem.

Almost everyone will just use their search engine to find this page: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html

What can you do to serve the licence to those who can't or won't do that (for whatever reason)? I think it is hard to find something more universally accessible to serve that edge case.

You describe your story of how sending a letter went to you, and I admit it sounds like a bit of a pain. But you managed to do it. And by the sound of it you were totally novice at it. (didn't even bring your own pen!) Someone can do the same thing you did anywhere from Nairobi, McMurdo, Pyongyang, or Vigánpetend.

It is not "universally accessible" in the "easy and comfortable" sense. It is "universally accessible" in the "almost anywhere where humans live you can access this service" sense.

I mean, part of the problem is I didn't own a pen at the time.

I have multiple computers and phones, I thought that was the interface to the post-2000 world.

I do have paint, but that's a little clumsy.

I grudgingly own a box of BIC pens now, but ... It's like requiring people to own a horse to do something these days. And in past experience during school days, those goddamn BIC pens all go bad (ink dries up or something), before I use even 5% of one of them.

I realize this all probably sounds very silly to someone born before 1980 but ... yeah it's just the reality of the world, I don't normally need pens to do anything, and am used to pens being provided in the rare occasions I need to sign a receipt or something, and usually I just end up drawing a cat on the signature line.

Oh, i absolutely get you! Was not intending to pen-shame you in any way. Just used it to illustrate that the postal process worked (eventually, and with a lot of inconvenience) even though you were not best prepared for it.

But i have been exactly where you are. We were having a book club and trying to vote on the next book to read, and turns out none of us out of twenty literature loving people had a single pen on us. So yeah, that is for sure the current reality.

> usually I just end up drawing a cat on the signature line.

Thats awesome! Do the they accept it usually?

Yes! I've never had an issue -- in the US at least, signatures on receipts generally don't matter. Cat sketches are usually fine.

The only place I've had it mattered is when signing bank documents in Asia.

> I realize this all probably sounds very silly to someone born before 1980

I was born after 1980 and I think you're beating a dead horse, here. You're conflating accessibility with convenience. Not just with this comment, but others you've made in this thread.

> those goddamn BIC pens all go bad (ink dries up or something), before I use even 5% of one of them.

Grab the pen by the end opposite the nib, give it a good shake for a few seconds, lick the nib, scribble on a scrap piece of paper until it starts writing again. Problem solved. You can't resurrect a dead laptop or computer by licking and shaking it (at least I've never succeeded in doing so).

Bravo! I cannot tell if this is a satire of something. Can some explain the joke, if any?

Your life sounds positively exhausting.

You are intentionally making things difficult when you don't own a pen.

That's very much your problem, and the rest of the world doesn't need to accommodate it.

When paper and pen was invented, I'm sure there was a bearded caveman holding a fish who made a comment about how it was someone's problem that they didn't have a tool to carve stone tablets.

Paper is on its way out, electrons are the new medium.

Do you realise that this is the exact same positions as people who refuse to use a computer or a phone on principle? Ranting about having to use a pen is not being hip or modern, it’s being obnoxious.

When paper was invented, it was expensive to make, and very few people had access to it. It was basically confined to a small priesthood and most people were illiterate. Paper remained quite expensive for centuries.

So it would've been pretty rich for someone to say, "talking to these illiterate peasants to their faces is on its way out. Don't they know that writing is the new medium?"

> I mean, part of the problem is I didn't own a pen at the time.

I find this mind-boggling.

I immediately came up with a parallel -- "they wanted me to walk to the counter but I do not own shoes."

Which took me to the universe of Pixar's _Wall-E_ and now I can't help but imagine that the subset of "people born after 1980" are helpless in their floating chairs and apparently I am aberrant because I learned to walk, and that makes me old.

> those goddamn BIC pens all go bad (ink dries up or something), before I use even 5% of one of them.

No, the ink does not dry. What happens is that the ball gets stuck if it is used too infrequently. This is solved by rubbing it against paper, or even better something rubbery. The underside of most people’s shoes works well for this. Just last week I used a Bic that was at least 30 years old. These things are very dependable.

If you're talking about packages via USPS, you can use print + pay & drop boxes for anything that fits.

https://www.usps.com/ship/online-shipping.htm

If you're talking about letters, the innumerable blue drop boxes.

I find it hard to believe that waiting two hours is normal for customers of the USPS. You can order stamps online, they have (collection) postboxes and even offer a pick-up service for parcels. At $0.73 to send a letter anywhere in the USA, that sounds like a pretty impressive offering to me.

It's lining up multiple times. When I walk in with a box, I don't know how the hell to mail it, what to fill out, what the pricing vs. delivery ETA grid is so I can decide where I want to position myself on that curve, the different forms you need to fill to be on different parts of that curve.

I usually end up screwing it up a few times in the process too. I didn't realize that the free boxes they give you are only for 2 day service (and doesn't work for 1 day or 3 day). 1 day is a different box, 3 day is bring-your-own-box.

The pens they provide don't work, you have to line up to get a pen. You have to line up to ask a question. The workers are grumpy, the people in line are grumpy, I've had the experience that sometimes nobody will let you cut anything even if it's just for a pen or a piece of tape.

Oh and they charge you if you ask for more than about X of tape. It's a tricky dance. I think X is about 20cm. If you ask for 30cm, they will refuse even the 20cm and ask you to buy 300cm, which entails getting in the 30 minute line again (so the actual cost of the tape is 0.5 * your hourly consulting rate, so if you're a software engineer paid $100/hour of stocks and $100/hour of equity, that'll be a $50 roll of tape plus $30 of stock assumimng Trump just announced more tariffs). If you ask for 15cm, they might give you 20cm for free. It's tricky. I wish there were a sign that said "free tape: <=20cm" or whatever the actual number is, in front of each employee's desk.

Which reminds me, the actual number also seems depends on the mood of the USPS employee, so you also need to carefully watch your position in line so that you try to get yourself in front of the happiest employee. If the grumpiest employee is almost done with their previous customer, you have to fake needing to fix something really quick and let someone ahead of you in the line so that they get the grumpy one and you get the happy one. Or you can try to estimate the processing time of the few people ahead of you in line by eyeballing the complexity of shipping whatever they are holding, and time your place in line to be in front of the happiest employee when it gets to you. That way you are more likely to get more free tape to seal your box.

You also need to think about how to keep them happy. That usually involves some small talk. More small talk gets you more tape. Weather is a good safe topic on the east coast, because you can commiserate the bad weather with the USPS employee, but in California the weather is always good, so it doesn't make for good small talk, and the USPS employee might be at risk of going from happy to grumpy because they'd rather be outside.

If you have this much difficulty mailing a package I think your consulting rate should be a lot more than $200 an hour.

Shipping quotes are trivial to get online. It's also easy to print shipping with pirateship.

USPS picks up packages for free with your regular delivery.

This is some other issue, perhaps untreated executive dysfunction.

I have seen people struggling to complete tasks at post offices and banks, queuing multiple times unnecessarily, being afraid of choosing the wrong options but not doing any research, etc. They don’t take the basic steps that the others in line do to make their visit work.

I find your experience at the post office weirdly fascinating. Yeah, I am a strange guy.

> I find it hard to believe that waiting two hours is normal for customers of the USPS.

GP said postal services are "universally accessible". So first, it doesn't matter is it's "normal", it matters if it happens at all. And USPS does not represent postal mail universally - I have never even seen a USPS building in my life and don't expect to. Is postal mail as universally accessible to a homeless man in Laos and a 5-year-old kid in rural India? I think it's ludicrous to claim that postal mail is "universally accessible" and displays a huge Western bias.

The task is sending a letter, not a parcel.

You buy the stamps (from the post office, another shop with opening hours you prefer, or online), sick one on the envelope and put it in a mailbox.

Overcomplicating everything so you can grumble on the internet isn't required.

A common mistake in accessibility is to assume accessibility is mostly for users who are blind. I've rarely seen the opposite approach, calling something accessible that is very much not accessible to a person who is blind. A url is much more accessible for many people with disabilities than the postal mail.

Even if you mean access instead of accessibility, presumably a person who can find a way to acquire stamps can just as easily make it to a library with public computers.

accessibility: the quality of being able to be entered or used by everyone, including people who have a disability

> Postal mail, for all its faults, is universally accessible by design

I think it's important to note that this isn't actually true. For a lot of homeless people or people who move often postal mail isn't as good. Online communication is actually more universal. Most (all?) public libraries have computers now.

Not sure if this works in other countries, but here in the Netherlands, homeless folks can get a postal address at municipal offices. People who move can set up (albeit paid) mail forwarding for up to a year.

Other than that, there’s good old ‘poste restante’, in which you can supposedly address mail to any post office and they’ll hold it for the recipient (even internationally), although I’ve never tried this.

(I appreciate that not everyone may actually know about these options, though.)

I wonder if any post offices have digital post box services to open, digitise, email and incinerate any incoming letters.

Physical mail isn't difficult, even now, for anyone with a modicum of competence. I can understand if someone hasn't used physical mail before, but it's very easy to look up how to send a letter + buy envelopes and stamps. If someone cannot do that without difficulty, they really need to work on their basic life skills.

Buying a stamp in the home country is doable for most people. But even then, imagine you are 20, how many mails do you think will you have sent?

For a different country, I'd have no idea. Especially if it's so far away like the USA and I can't locally get a special reply post stamp. What I would have done is to put in 5€ in the envelope and call it a day. The person would probably be happy seeing other money.

His difficulty was finding postage stamps for the self-addressed return envelope, and clearly the author is not American. Do you think it would be quite so easy to "buy envelopes and stamps" if you had to send a stamped return envelope to Nepal or Manila? Is that a "basic life skill" or would you have to do a little research to figure out what you'd need?

He had difficulty writing an address on an envelope.

This skill is something we expect of 8 year old children.

Maybe we used to. When sending letters was still a thing people did.

Nowadays, not really. I had a similar experience - the first (well, first in a few years) time I had to send mail was this year for my taxes, and I ended up having to buy another envelope from the post office because I mixed up the delivery address and return address.

I sympathize strongly with the author. I write with a pen so infrequently (years between handwriting) that I often have handwriting errors that displease me.

So I usually do some practice writing on scratch paper before attempting the final version.

Notice he said "printing the address would have taken less time". That doesn't sound like the issue was formatting or knowledge. It reads to me as the physical skill of penmanship.

How is that possible? I write things literally every day. Everyone I know does so. How do you go a literal year without picking up a pen?

Aside for signing my signature (which I almost never need to do anymore) then the only time I need to handwrite is to fill out forms, usually for medical purposes, and I don't go to the doctor every year (yes, I recognize this is unwise).

If I have time I prefer to scan forms and fill them out with a computer.

All my text generation is digital using either a keyboard or touchscreen.

At various points, I've gone years at a stretch without using a pen -- except maybe to scribble my signature on a paycheck or something. I just never encountered anything that required using one during those times.

It's not very far-fetched -- especially for regions where paper checks became outdated long ago, like my European friends have told me has been the case there since the Earth cooled.

So how, specifically?

These days, I get paid electronically. I pay my bills online. I bought some Forever stamps and mailing envelopes once about 5 years ago, but I haven't had any reason yet to use any of them. If I have to send out a package, I'm using a service like PirateShip and printing a self-adhesive label to keep it consistent with other packages. My work is usually done with a computer -- and when it is more hands-on, then it's usually work that doesn't imply writing anything at all.

When I want to take a quick note, I use my pocket supercomputer. For longer notes and correspondence, I use a real computer. If I need to draw a diagram to share with others, I'll probably be sharing it with them electronically so I produce that diagram electronically from the start.

I did use a pen the other day to draw a napkin sketch of a wiring diagram for some changes I want to make in my garage. AFAIK, I only have 1 working pen at home. I knew exactly where to find it; it was sitting in the last place I used it, about 3 months ago.

But now I'm inclined to reproduce that diagram electronically so I can easily move elements around and label it all clearly (so I can formulate a complete plan and spend more of my time doing the work instead of thinking about it once I get up on a ladder in the dark), so drawing it on paper may have been just a duplication of effort.

Agreed. I am a millennial, so most likely older than the author.

Not having envelopes at the ready is one thing, but ordering stamps... on eBay??? And then wasting a few envelopes because writing down the address is unusual? That kind of blew my mind.

I am a software engineer, and I always have a paper notebook and a pen next to my keyboard to write down stuff.

I guess this all tells me I'm getting old :-).

> but ordering stamps... on eBay

OP was ordering US stamps to include _in_ the letter, on an SAE (self-addressed envelope) they were sending _from_ the UK, so that the FSF could reply (from the US) using said stamps.

As a millennial myself, I have no idea where else I'd look for <recipient country> stamps should I want to include them on a SAE I was sending to said country, so that they recipient wouldn't incur the cost of replying to me.

I don't find looking on eBay particularly strange, though I'd do a quick search for alternatives first.

Sure but, on the other hand, this was overly kind of him. In general, unless it is explicitely requested that you must provide a stamped envelope for the reply the assumption of snail mail is that each side pays for its own envelopes and stamps.

And you could also put a dollars bill in the envelope?

From the UK...?

The Post Office will sell you US currency, but AFAIK not US stamps.

Perhaps a couple of grams of silver?

How to get accountants to hate you in one easy step

Offhand, I don't think I've ever mailed an International letter or package.

Is return postage something that, normally, my local post office would help me with? E.G. do they have some method of marking or adding post to a package that would be accepted globally (or at least within the destination country)?

That's the International Reply Coupon mentioned in the article, but it's not supported by all countries.

I think I've sent far more international letters and parcels than domestic. Christmas cards for elderly relatives in the country I was born in, and postcards when I travelled abroad.

Some obscure things I sold on eBay were mostly sent abroad.

"""

United Kingdom

The Royal Mail stopped selling IRCs on 31 December 2011[26] due to a lack of demand. United States

The United States Postal Service stopped selling international reply coupons on 27 January 2013.[27]

"""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reply_coupon#Uni...

That explains why I was confounded in my efforts to search within USPS results.

yep, article also mentions them:

> I was disappointed to find out that the UK’s Royal Mail discontinued international reply coupons in 2011. The only alternative that I could think of was to buy some US stamps.

I send $3 U.S. with QSL (ham radio) cards. It seems like everybody is able to convert that to local currency to cover postage.

I send international reply coupons with QSL cards. They no longer sell them in Ireland, where I live, but you can still order them from Swiss Post, online. They work everywhere. They mail them to you for free.

https://shop.post.ch/en/packing-sending/sending-letters/regi...

> I have no idea where else I'd look for <recipient country> stamps should I want to include them on a SAE I was sending to said country

I would try to buy them online from their post office. For the USA, there is https://www.usps.com/business/postage-options.htm:

“Print Labels Online with Click-N-Ship

With your free USPS.com account, you can pay for postage and print just one label or a batch of shipping labels online”

Germany has (https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/deutsche-pos...):

“You simply need to open the app, select the appropriate postage service, tick “Code for labelling” (Code zum Beschriften), and pay with PayPal. You will then immediately receive a code, consisting of the letters #PORTO and an eight-digit string, which you must write in pen in the top right-hand corner of the envelope or postcard. Then, just pop it in the post box, and you’re done! The code is valid for 14 days and can only be used for Germany-bound mail.”

That 14-day limit may not be a good idea for this use case.

that honestly seems more complicated and likely to fail than just buying the correct stamps on ebay.

That German app is not available in the App Store in my country (and I presume in any country other than Germany), so I would also be forced to go to eBay for stamps

Then I would Google for an alternative, and find https://shop.deutschepost.de/briefversand/briefmarken/briefm...

You use an International Reply Coupon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reply_coupon

You obviously read neither the blog post nor the Wikipedia article.

The Deutsche Post '#PORTO' method does not apply to international shipments, unfortunately. However, you can still purchase barcode labels online for printing, and conventional stamps are simply values in Euro cents so can be used for both domestic and international deliveries.

In addition, the 14-day limit no longer applies. Deutsche Post were challenged in court, and the digital stamps must now last for as long as conventional stamps do:

https://nrwe.justiz.nrw.de/olgs/koeln/j2023/3_U_148_22_Urtei...

I just priced a stamp to send to New Zealand using that USPS website and it came to over USD$20 so that's not a realistic option. To be fair I had to take some guesses with weight (what the fuck is an ounce and how many letters fit into one?) and dimensions (they don't have units on that website, so I guess my letter is 6x3 whatevers).

The author in the UK so it's pretty much a given that they're exaggerating for comedic effect, but... living in the UK myself, I have only sent maybe about 5 letters in my life, all to the government bureaucracy, and none more recently than a decade ago. And I'm a millennial, albeit on the younger side (so I tell myself).

I don't have any pens, paper or a printer in my house, so I'd probably go to my workplace if I needed to send a letter nowadays. I do occasionally send a parcel though, which involves printing off a shipping label, so the process isn't completely alien.

We don't have a printer at home (UK), sending parcels is the only time we'd need it but our small local post office prints labels (eg for Amazon returns, or parcel companies).

I did print a page at work recently, the second one since I started my job 5 years ago.

Most of the time I have to send parcels now, I use those drop off lockers where you just put it in the right cubbyhole and - I guess - they label it when they pick it up. Otherwise, most couriers will do label on pickup, or the return label is included with the delivery in the first place. Very occasionally there's no other option but to find some way of printing it myself.

I did have a small inkjet printer at one point, but the ink kept drying up, so in the end it was costing me £10 and a trip to Tesco every time I needed to print something. Thought about getting a laser, but it's quite a lot of space to waste on something I use so rarely. I might get one of those little thermal printers that are small enough to keep in a drawer.

It's bizarre to hear about people not even having a single pen, like the author. What's the last time you ever used one? What is your daily life like?

I think the last the last time I used a writing implement was actually about two months ago, and it was a sharpie that I had to go to the corner shop to buy. I needed to take a verification picture of myself holding the date for an online pharmacy.

I do have an iPad with an Apple Pencil, but even that I use quite rarely - though I at least know where it is. If I'm annotating a PDF, that would be my tool of choice.

Aside from that, I'm not sure that my daily life is really that unrecognisable from anyone else's. Just that instead of writing stuff on paper, I either type it or tap it on my phone. For maths, I'm just quite quick at TeX input.

I went for 10 years not using a pen at home. That streak would be even longer, except for about a year I took up journalling as a hobby.

I'm not sure exactly what you think people must be handwriting:

- Notes? I use Obsidian for work notes, Google Keep for stuff like shopping lists

- Signatures? Delivery receipt signatures are done with a finger on a touch screen, stuff like employment contracts and finance paperwork have basically all moved to e-signatures. I genuinely think the last thing I signed with a pen might have been my mortgage, and that one I had to go to solicitor's office anyway as it had to be officially witnessed.

- Paper forms? Print, sign and scan was occasionally requested until a few years ago, but I did it in the office because I also didn't own a printer at that time. Even "important government forms" are done online now.

I'm also a millennial software engineer but I usually write stuff down to text files. I do use pen and paper to draw things if that helps my understanding of them. Like when there's geometry involved.

Sending letters isn't an alien concept to me either. I'm old enough to have done it regularly as a kid. I especially liked the part where you have to write the zip code in those machine-readable digits.

> I especially liked the part where you have to write the zip code in those machine-readable digits.

How long ago was that? The machine have gotten really good at deciphering regular handwriting quite a while ago.

When and where were you required to write the ZIP so strangely? I've never heard of such a bizarre requirement.

Russia. It's still a thing most likely.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Russian_postal_codes...

Fascinating, thanks!

That is cool!

> And then wasting a few envelopes because writing down the address is unusual? That kind of blew my mind.

Some people really have terrible hand writing. And dyslexia is a thing, too.

That weren’t the reasons stated, though.

I actually buy all my stamps on eBay. You can buy legit Forever USA stamps at below market rates.

Nah, I'm young and even to me the author's just on the extreme side of "digital native". The first thing I saw in the article was this and knew it was fake, too: "Considering the storage constraints back then" (he's just repeating it, he doesn't know if it's actually applicable). And now you know why random blogs, while insightful, shouldn't be treated as gold truth.

> Not sure if it's being exaggerated for comedic purposes but it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author.

It was pretty recognizable as trolling--the very good and clever "old school Internet" style of trolling where it sounds plausible and sincere, but then you get done reading it and say, "Oh lawd, he got me! Good one!" The kind of writing that people used to spend a lot of time perfecting on Slashdot. I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned. It was very earnestly written though, bravo!

> I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned.

Some adults were born in 2007

Younger than Gmail, YouTube, and the iPhone.

The iPhone is not yet 18.

By only two months.

Anyone, even someone born in 2007, should know how to use pen and paper. This is a basic component of being an educated person, not knowing how to do that is as shocking as being illiterate.

Sure. But why are they mailing letters? I remember being 18 myself (a looong time ago), and having a helpful adult shocked that nobody had ever taught me how to write a check. I think I've written a total of 8 in my whole life now?

If a British 12 year old today were to need to write a cheque, I'd expect they would need to look up or be told how it's done.

I wouldn't expect them to need to buy a pen first, or to need several attempts to write 10 words nearly.

You messed up typing nearly though.

> I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned.

Well, believe it. I'm in my 40s and haven't written a letter since I was a kid. Why would I ever have to? Ask someone who was born in 2003 if they've ever written and mailed a letter. 99% are going to say no.

As someone born in 2003, I did this just last week when filing my tax returns.

>As someone born in 2003, I did this just last week when filing my tax returns.

Why didn't you efile like a normal person? The only time you need to do it the hard way is if you are under 16 and filing for the first time.

I had to file by mail because I moved to a new state and got 2 W-2s for the same job, of which the W-2 for the former state left the federal fields (1-13) blank. This weird W-2 apparently makes me ineligible for e-file.

Edit: In hindsight, I could have just waited until the start of 2025 to update my address in the HR system and gotten a single, normal W-2, but then I would be both violating the remote work rules (by not adding my new work location) and (probably) committing tax fraud.

There is a lot of stuff that can make you ineligible for efiling.anything exceptional and not handled by the standard form requires efiling. They only just recently dropped the requirement for 83(b) elections to be sent in with your tax return, and until then I had to send in a paper return every time I did that.

You file tax returns by post? What country? Do they charge you extra to submit by post?

That's crazy to me - tax returns for our micro-business and personal tax has been online since at least 2005.

I had to file my tax by postal mail in the US. Granted there is the option to file online, but that only works for ~80% of the people when things are completely within the intended domain. I have just one extra item outside of standard salary slips and some investment income, so I had to file physically.

For federal returns, there's a site called Free File Fillable Forms, which has digitized versions of all the tax forms. Unlike the normal IRS Free File program, there's no restriction on income. If you're comfortable filing paper tax returns, this is the exact same process except the returns are digital and sent over the internet. For state returns, the process depends on your state but everywhere I've lived has a free site that you can use to file your state return.

From https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form...:

Attaching statements — This program does not allow you to attach any documents to your return, except those available through the program. If you need to attach any such documents, you will have to print and mail in the return.

Especially with business returns, it's common to have to attach statements to certain forms, for example if you choose the de minimis election for equipment repairs that would otherwise have to be capitalized, or when the § 174 changes went into effect and everyone had to start amortizing software development expenses over multiple years. You can't do that on Free File Fillable Forms.

In my state (Minnesota), there is no free online filing for state income tax. You either pay for one of the online filing softwares, or print the sucker out and mail it in. I choose the latter :)

Most people do it digitally or have an accountant do it, this isn't the norm.

Do you not send thank you cards for birthday and holiday gifts?

Physical thank you cards are pretty dead. I don't even keep track of mailing addresses for a number of my friends (and a couple siblings, come to think of it) - how would I send them a physical card?

Even older relatives - we sent a physical gift a bit ago, but the response/thanks was by text. It just doesn't make sense to send a letter, have it take a week, never know whether it got lost, etc.

In Europe where I live sending birthday letters and the like to relatives is still a standard practice, at least in my social environment.

No. In person, text, or phone call.

The only people I know of that do this are over 60.

I just sent in my taxes by USPS mail a couple of weeks ago. Long after online payments were available, I would pay my monthly bills by writing checks and sending them in the mail, as that process actually took me less time than logging in to five or six different websites and navigating through their online payment flows.

That's very uncommon. All my bills are set to autopay on my credit card. Who manually pays bills? You don't need to click the buttons every month.

I click them manually every month. It's kind of a holdover from when I needed to time things in order to keep my checking account in the black, but I kept the process as it helps me keep track of my bills and catch any errors or discrepancies, which does happen.

It certainly takes less time than writing a check and stuffing an envelope, though, what with saved credentials and smartphones; I can do this in a matter of moments while lying in bed every other Friday morning.

Payment to a credit card often involves extra fees. And I don't want to give them autopay access to my checking account.

There's a difference between writing a letter longhand, and simply knowing how to use a pen.

I had to inform numerous companies of my mums death last year. A lot of them had either phone support with very long wait times or a postal address, no email. It took me less time to write a letter and post it than to wait on hold

Once I had to send an international RMA that they wouldn't pay for the shipping. It went something like this:

0. Went to Fedex to check on the shipping cost for this tiny box. It was $120 so I passed

1. Went to USPS, found that they were closed, the only option was a 30 minute line to use the machine. Lined up for 30 minutes, found that it the goddamn UI on the machine did not support international shipments.

2. Went home to generate a USPS international shipping label. $25, much more acceptable. FedEx should be out of business.

3. I didn't have a 2D printer at home, tried to 3D print the shipping label with 1 layer of white and 1 layer of black but it wasn't high resolution enough in the X/Y direction for the label to be readable so I gave up

4. Went to FedEx to use their 2D printers but realized I forgot my USB drive at home

5. Went home to get my USB drive

6. Back to FedEx, realized I forgot my mask (this was COVID times, so no go)

7. Went home to get my mask

8. Back to FedEx, printed the 2D shipping label

9. Back to USPS, found out they had no tape

10. Back to FedEx to buy a roll of tape because I don't know where the hell else to buy tape same day, and all my tape at home are electrical tape, teflon tape, or Gorilla tape

11. Back to USPS and the stupid package drop box had a mechanical issue preventing it from opening more than a few cm, not enough to fit my package

12. Went to another USPS to drop the package

> 3. I didn't have a 2D printer at home, tried to 3D print the shipping label

This sentence really captures the absurdity of this story.

Could have 3D printed a pen holder for the 3D printer and then used the 3D printer as a plotter to write the address on a sticker or the envelope itself.

Right?

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3712501

>12. Went to another USPS to drop the package

You have a USPS drop box for tiny boxes in front of your house.

> house

I can't afford a house ($2M+ where I live), so I don't have one of those mailboxes. My apartment complex doesn't have a visible USPS pickup anywhere that I know of.

If you meant those inverted U shaped things that look like they are from WW2 (maybe WW1?), I forgot about those, but somehow I never know how frequently they are checked ... there is no indicator about when they were last opened and I wonder whether the mailman might just forget about a couple of them in odd parts of town, which is why I always feel more "secure" dropping it at a USPS.

I was once walking down the street when I saw a presumably-GenZ person who thought they were a trash can and casually dumped trash in it so there's also that concern, if everyone is using them as trash cans now ...

Most are picked up daily at a scheduled time.

>My apartment complex doesn't have a visible USPS pickup anywhere that I know of.

They usually a slot or little door for outgoing letters, if your package was larger than that, sometimes you can leave them at the 'office' of your complex if they have one. But yeah, in your case, going to an actual post office might have been the solution if you don't trust the street mailboxes.

Even if you are in rural Alaska or something, drop boxes are checked on a rigid schedule as part of the mail delivery route. They’re reliable.

I do? Where?

Mailboxes are bidirectional. If there is outgoing mail in the mailbox your postal worker will take it to the post office. That is what the flag is for. Not sure how well this is adhered to anymore, to be fair. I could be out of date.

Not sure about OP but it's become more common in certain areas of the US to not have mailboxes in front of each house. But usually there's a shared bank of mailboxes within a mile so with the ability to drop off outgoing

Your doorstep. You just leave it there and they pick it up.

> FedEx should be out of business.

Those crazy retail rates exist so businesses can get big discounts. The company I work with ships maybe half a dozen packages international with FedEx a year and they still give us like 60-70% off retail.

> But I guess younger people and particularly those in tech may genuinely never need a reason

I don't think it's just a age/generation thing though. I'm one year older than my wife, but I grew up in Sweden in the 90s, she grew up in Peru. Somehow, sending/receiving letters was something I've done multiple times growing up, but she never did, and wasn't until we were living together in Spain in the 2010s that she for the first time in her life sent a letter via the street mailboxes. She's not in tech either, if that matters, while I am.

Probably because in our countries (I'm also from S.America) the reliability of the post office is questionable at best, so it wasn't something I ever really used.

In most/all of Europe, letter volumes are reducing but they're still used. Even where email is common, letters are usually possible.

In your country,

- how do you get a new bank card, when the current one expires?

- how are you informed about a change like a price increase for electricity?

- how do you pay for electricity? (Knowing how much to pay, when etc) What about an elderly person?

All of these examples are about receiving though.

Yes, but that's still dependent on the reliability of the post office.

To answer your questions: receiving letters is easy, companies know how to do it. Sending letters is not common for the public.

Danish Post will soon terminate general mail delivery due to low need.

https://apnews.com/article/postnord-denmark-postal-service-m...

To our questions from Germany:

- by Post, but I can imagine this changing as payment via phone/watch/... is spreading and I can imagine banks willing to reduce cost, making physical cards an paid extra.

- on my contract via e-mail and the energy company's website. There are paper based contracts available, though.

- In Germany/Europe SEPA wire transfers work well for that and are being used for decades, even with online banking being wide spread in the 90ies. (Pre Internet via BTX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext )

You physically go to the bank.

The electricity company has their own employees to deliver paper monthly statements to all their customers, they can attach other communications if needed.

My bank has a connection to the electricity company, and can look up in realtime what my open balance is, which you can view and pay in the banking app. You can also pay it in cash at various offices (e.g. Western Union) around the city.

You can also just give the electricity company permission to automatically take it out of your account every month (ppl don't trust the electricity company to get the amount correct, so folks don't usually do this. I do this for the water bill though).

(this is my experience living in Ecuador for 10 years, I'm from the Netherlands, most of this is weird to me :)

Three weeks ago I was part of a comment thread on this very site, where people were wondering why banks still had buildings for people to go in to.

In some countries, it is somewhat of a question "why" though. For example, banks in Sweden stopped carrying cash, and AFAIK (at least when I lived there) you interact with them either online or via the telephone, even cards are sent your home address instead of being picked up the branch and so on.

Contrast to where I live now (Spain) where I can still go to the bank to deposit/withdraw money, so the use case for the branch/building/office is kind of obvious.

Yes, there are few reasons to go to a Swedish bank branch, and they've been closing branches, too. Almost everything is done online - really goes for most things in Sweden, not just banks.

You don't even visit a branch to become a customer as long as you have an account with some other bank, which gives you BankID, a digital ID/signature system that's ubiquitous in Sweden. I have accounts with three Swedish banks. Of those, one doesn't have physical locations to visit, and a second I never visited. It's surely been ten years since I went to the third, my main bank, in person, and the branch office I went to closed years ago. Looking it up, my main bank only has one office left in the city, it's only open for three hours a day and requires a prior appointment for any services.

Cash is only handled by a few bank branches (not all banks) and even then by prior booking - cash has been pretty much gone from society for a while now. Your card gets sent to you by postal mail. If you need to talk to someone at the bank, they'll suggest telephone or video calls, and will only see you in person as a last resort. Safe deposit boxes have also been largely discontinued as a service.

There are multiple ways to receive letters. Having a mailman delivering it directly to your house is usually the rich area's way to handle it. The lower version of this is to let people check with the post office themselves. If it's fancy, you have at least your personal postbox there, or you will have to ask office-workers which then depends on their working time. And outside of this, there are other ways to use other locations and people, not directly affiliated with the postal service for delivering letters. Pubs and other shops are often such locations, or in really poor areas the village chief will receive them, and then handle distribution.

But it should be noted, except the physical objects, those letters can be also replaced with other means of communication. Just calling people via phone is common, or nowadays sending an email will also do the job. In my country we have a working and reliable postal system, but companies are still replacing letters with digital communication as far as laws allow it. Payments are also running automatically, so the bills are more informative and for taxes.

> - how do you get a new bank card, when the current one expires?

The bank sends it through mail but they warn you that if it doesn't arrive within 2 weeks you should go in person to the bank to retrieve it. Depending on where you live there's a 50/50 chance that it never arrives through mail so you just wait 2 weeks and go to the bank.

> - how are you informed about a change like a price increase for electricity?

Email. Or the news channel for elderly people (if the increase is too big). If the increase is small that's a fact of life, everyone just expects it to increase a bit every 2 or 3 months.

> - how do you pay for electricity? (Knowing how much to pay, when etc) What about an elderly person?

Website or bank app. There are physical places that take cash payments and do the online process for you, elderly people generally use those.

I'm from a similar country and would never have thought about using snail mail for anything you've mentioned.

For bank cards you go to their branch and get a new one from a person who works there, or by interacting with a terminal which prints your name on a blank card and spits it out. Some banks deliver them to your home address by courier service and hand them over in person, and they're not "elite" or special by any means.

Utilities are paid through online/mobile banking, there are many alternatives and it takes maybe 10 seconds. Even my 70-something year old relatives use them. Some even older ones rely on help from others, or to go physical bank branches and pay there (which wastes a lot of time of everyone waiting in line to be serviced — I don't personally know anyone who does that, but have seen it a couple of times).

Price increases? Local news, or you can subscribe to receive them by email. Or just check in the online banking app when it's time to make another payment, it's all there.

Am Estonian, and from your list only the first one is with physical mail, though more and more people use virtual cards / Apple Pay instead of even owning a physical card. We can also withdraw cash from an ATM using Apple Pay, no need for a card.

As for price changes regarding utilities (or really, anything) we get an e-mail from the service provider or from the landlord (who then gets an e-mail from the service provider). We also pay for utilities via an online bank transfer or automated subscription to the service provider or to the landlord via a bank transfer (who then pays via an online bank transfer or has an automated subscription).

Elderly people set up automatic subscription services in their local bank branch or by calling the bank, I have not heard of a single elderly person using mail to pay for anything.

I'm in the UK where we do have a generally very reliable postal service, but of those three, it's only the bank card that involves a physical letter for me - and even then I have no idea where my bank cards even are because I just use contactless via my phone/watch nowadays.

My electricity payment is direct debit - though I can pay manually via the app if I wish. The app has the amount on it, and they notify of service changes via the app and email. I suppose that if I ignored the electronic notifications they'd eventually send me a letter.

Even if you do get your statements by post, basically nobody here would pay for it by mail. If you really hate computers, you can pay over the phone, or set up a direct debit by phone/letter, or use a "PayPoint" - which includes most corner shops, supermarkets and post offices. It's also quite common for elderly people to just have one of their younger relatives manage it all for them.

The paper size and foreign stamps make sense, but I must say the inability to use a pen surprised me a little more.

I'm not an American and I did write letters in my country of origin as a kid, but one thing that annoys me about US-style envelopes to this day is that they have no lines for address - you're just expected to line text up on your own correctly. If you're used to writing on lined paper because that's the standard in your country (including envelopes!), it can be frustrating.

The envelopes I'm used to look like this: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B2%D0%B5...

Do they still say Министерство связи СССР ?

They did for a few years after USSR was gone, as they were still going through old supplies.

AFAIK modern Russian ones just say "Почта России", but the overall design is retained, including pre-labelled lines for various parts of address.

> one thing that annoys me about US-style envelopes to this day is that they have no lines for address

I'm an American and I've used envelopes that have lines to write addresses on. I used to see them every now and then. In fact, I have about half a box sitting in my filing cabinet next to me that I probably haven't used for years.

Many envelopes don't have the lines, though.

We have envelopes like that, too, but they're not all that common.

In the UK at school in the 90s we were taught how to write a letter including addressing and stamping the envelope. It's quite strange to see it done "wrong" like in the OP. You're supposed to have the first line of the address centred vertically, leaving the top half for stamps. At least they got the stamps on the correct (right) side, though. I've seen a lot worse.

I wouldn't say it's that different from how the Royal Mail currently recommend one write the address:

https://help.royalmail.com/personal/s/article/How-to-address...

My father writes the address staggered; that is, each subsequent line being indented a centimetre or so relative to the previous line. Were you taught to stagger the address at your school in the 90s?

Yes, I was taught to do it staggered, but I think this was dying out at the time and I believe that by the time I wrote any letters of my own I didn't do the staggering. My theory is it's because of the prevalence of printed labels. I haven't seen it for a long time now.

Now that I'm reminiscing a bit, it was also fairly common at the time for people to order a batch of sender labels that they could affix to the envelope. My grandparents had particularly distinctive golden metallic labels which meant you could instantly tell who it was from (if you didn't already recognise the handwriting).

>you're just expected to line text up on your own correctly.

It only has to be lined up well enough to be read by a human, they don't reject them just because it's sloppy or not lined up correctly.

Yes, I know. It still offends my aesthetic sensibilities. ~

Being unaware of paper sizes is baffling to me - where I live, letter and legal paper are common but I’m entirely aware of ISO216 paper sizes.

In a country using ISO paper, national paper sizes of one of the few places not using this standard are obscure.

I've never seen it in any office or stationary shop in Europe. It's available online, at a premium.

True, any page oriented software like LibreOffice, Inkscape, Gimp, will show you US Letter sizes and US Letter Envelope sizes and you may have messed up with printing on wrong size... but as other posters say, maybe this days nobody prints on real paper anymore...

They all default to ISO sizes for me.

If I format the page size, Libreoffice does offer "Letter" and "Legal". GIMP shows them as "US Letter" and "US Legal" but again they're not the default.

It wouldn't surprise me if most non-US users hadn't seen them at all, and certainly not that they don't realise the US uses a different size.

It's still problematic the other way around - you try to print that PDF on A4, but it's formatted for US Letter.

In most cases it still doesn't matter, either because software defaults to scaling to fit, or else because the margins are large enough that it works out even if printed in true size. But sometimes stars align and then you learn about those weird paper sizes.

Odd take. It seems perfectly natural that the country using different sizes from everybody else would be aware of that fact, but that a country using the same size as 95% of the world might not know about the weirdo sizes used by those 5%.

Fair but if you’re going to diss, at least be aware it’s not just one country :) (I’ve never lived in the country you’re thinking of, and all the countries I’ve lived in use non-ISO216 paper sizes).

I live in Italy and I've never seen a normal "office" paper sheet which is not A4.

It's one thing to know that the US, Canada and the Philippines don't use the same paper sizes as the other 190 countries in the world; it's quite another to be given a physical example for the first time in your life.

You missed at least one other country that uses “US” paper sizes.

Thanks for such an enlightening comment in which you were too lazy to write a 13th word naming the country you were thinking of.

For anyone else curious as I was: Mexico is the 4th country, and I don't believe there are any others (but I could be wrong).

There are more Letter countries than just those four. Nicely covered with the “I could be wrong” though.

Last time I gave you the benefit of the doubt that you at least thought your comment was worth posting, now I assume you're just a troll and am blocking so I won't see your comments again.

What’s more trollish than telling someone “I’m blocking you because you’re a troll”? If you’re going to block me just block me, don’t owe any explanations to me.

You’re so funny heheh

They're not just uncommon, they're not used at all. You will only see US legal in the UK if an American company/person sends it to you, how often do you think that happens? I've had it maybe once or twice, but you could easily never see it, especially people born ~this century growing up with less paper of any size anyway.

It's exceedingly rare to encounter US paper sizes in the UK and I expect the rest of Europe too. I've only received these from two places: the FSF and Donald Knuth.

One time at my old job I was trying to load the printer, and I said something like "Oh shoot, these are oversized sheets; I need the 8.5x11."

My coworker looked at me like I was crazy. "The what?"

"The normal printer paper, the 8.5 by 11 inch paper"

"Why do you know the exact size of printer paper??"

I did not know how to respond to this question.

Whenever someone questions what you know, the correct answer is “why don’t you?” - I will not be trivia-shamed!

Ha, I'm trying to remember where I learned that as well. I know we covered it in drafting where we learned an 8.5x11 A paper is half a sheet of 11x17 B paper which is half a sheet of 17x22 C paper, and so on. But I thought I knew the size of A paper long before that, and that it was common knowledge, though I can't think of where or why I would have needed to know. Then again I also know that legal paper is 8.5x14 even though I have never had to use it.

Grade school for me - teachers would say "8.5x11" instead of "letter size" or even just "printer paper." I don't know why they did it, and I assume it's for the same reason that I say it too. It's probably what their teachers said to them!

Because that’s the size of the paper.

The problem is that the rest of the world is not aware of US sizes.

Thus HP printers continually displaying "PC LOAD LETTER" on printers outside the US dealing with documents generated by people in the US.

On don’t worry, they also show PC LOAD LETTER in the US even when the correct paper size is loaded :)

>On don’t worry, they also show PC LOAD LETTER in the US even when the correct paper size is loaded :)

Only if there is an issue with the rollers or something and it can't feed the paper from the paper cassette. No one ever wants to read the manuals or do basic troubleshooting though. Hell newer ones have a menu on them that will walk you through each of the troubleshooting steps, but people would rather put a post-it on it saying it's broken.

I was joking :)

I never realized that “LETTER” in that error referred to paper size—no printer I’ve had has actually given that error, so I only ever heard about it through oblique references to Office Space and such. It makes so much more sense now…

The 'PC' part is paper cassette, it's the printer literally telling you to load letter sized paper into the paper cassette, but everyone acts like it's some mysterious message that's impossible to figure out.

Well, PC also means Personal Computer, and letter also means element of alphabet, so it's not like there isn't room for confusion

Sounds impossible if you didn't read the manual. Who reads manuals?

Could be PC LOAD LEGAL if your document is really weird.

Yeah that's crazy. I use pens to doodle designs or write little recipes or Kanban cards or index cards for what's inside a box... The author maybe does all that by typewriter?

Or they do it all digital, or don't even do it at all. Label printers and note-apps are very popular with IT-people.

I wrote a letter to a friend last year. It was the first time in probably well over a decade I had used a pen for more than just scribbled notes or doodling. I made a ton of mistakes and I wasted at least a dozen sheets of paper rewriting it. Seems it's one of those skills that deteriorates without frequent practice, at least for me.

> I made a ton of mistakes and I wasted at least a dozen sheets of paper rewriting it. Seems it's one of those skills that deteriorates without frequent practice, at least for me.

Back in the old days when people still wrote by hand, they also made mistakes, but just scribbled them out and kept going. Starting over was only necessary with doing something special.

Sending physical mail is one thing. I no longer consider myself "digital native" after reading this:

> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes, printing the address would have taken less time

I grew up pre-smartphone (pre-Web, partially, even) and even through college probably half my total output for school was hand written (friggin' blue book exams, LOL)

Some time last year, when trying to write something by hand and finding it alien and awkward, it occurred to me that for probably something like 15 years, and maybe more, I've perhaps not written more than a hundred words (signatures aside) by hand per year.

I have kids, so nearly all those words are on the stupid forms they constantly make you re-fill-out from scratch for no apparent reason at doctor's offices. If not for that, it'd be even lower. Some years I bet I was under 50. I go months without writing more than two or three words, total.

Even digital natives are using pens with their smartphones and tablets these days. It's just a choice now whether you use them. Though, not sure whether kids these days are still learning it in school.

Disappointed that International Reply Coupons are no longer a thing too! I used one back in the 1980s to write to the authors of the Power C compiler[1] in the US about a bug (yes, a bug report by mail). I enclosed an IRC in case they wanted to reply. They were kind enough to write back, and didn't use the IRC (but sent it back). They did however include a floppy disk with the fixed compiler, which was nice of them.

[1] Still around: http://mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm

I still use them for ham radio QSL cards. They work everywhere that is a member of the Universal Postal Union (nearly all are). You can buy them online from Swiss Post. They will mail them for free.

https://shop.post.ch/en/packing-sending/sending-letters/regi...

I have a roll of Forever stamps, purchased years ago. I don't even remember why, specifically, I purchased them. In theory, I could post a letter on my deathbed (I'm Generation X, so it's not that far off) and be assured that the delivery fee is covered by the cost of one stamp. Unfortunately, most of the people I would wish to correspond with will also be deceased at that time. So …

I leave it to y'all to monkey-knife-fight for the rest of the roll.

I think the strangest part is that it had been years since they had used a pen.

Keeping a pad of paper at your computer is one of those underrated things. You'd think the computer can record information just like the paper, and it can, but psychology is weird.

Agreed. Grabbing a pen and a post-it is faster for me than opening a text document, and a pad of paper allows me to format and diagram things freely.

The post-its can be sorted, stacked, moved, stuck to pertinent notebook pages, altered, and ultimately recycled when they are no longer relevant. It's much freer than a document on a phone or computer, where it can still be a pain to move information from one domain to another.

Sending mail being a challenging or difficult thing does come across as odd to me, being in Canada and born in the late 90s. Sure I haven't mailed a letter in a couple years, but when I do the main hassle is just finding where I put my stamps. I can however understand that finding return postage would be a hassle; I'm not sure why the UK and Canada (amongst others) don't do IRCs anymore.

It's also much easier these days to find out how to correctly format an address for a given destination. (At least for alphabet-based languages; I recently tried to decipher a Korean address in a business park and got nowhere fast.)

I don't send letters by post but I often need to send packages by post. Perhaps it's returning some merchandise where the merchant didn't have free shipping. Perhaps it's shipping a security key to a close friend so I can have offsite backup of a key. When I moved, I got rid of my book collection by asking friends which books they wanted and I shipped it to them (media mail is cheap).

It's efficient to transmit information over the internet, but it's still essential to send physical items by post. When I visit USPS branches, I always see plenty of people mailing packages.

Sending international postage in my country (South Africa) is not a very reliable process, so couriers and email are used quite heavily here instead. Its not necessarily an age thing.

> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes, printing the address would have taken less time.

Sometimes I cut out my address from a bill and tape that on as my return address. I know it’s formatted right.

I’d definitely do the same on a “self”-addressed stamped envelope that I need returned.

As far as I know there are still some things you have to post in the UK, like sending your cut up old driver's licence to the DVLA and maybe you still have to post your V5 when you sell a car. OP might not own a car or drive, though, so who knows?

V5Cs have been online for 3-4 years now.

You still have to send back your cut up old driver's license, though I have my doubts that someone is sat there checking and cross referencing each one they receive.

Honestly, sending letters is increasingly alien: I rarely send one letter per year. This year I have sent two, only because I am trying to contact an incredibly old-fashioned directorate of the German government that doesn't seem to have an email address.

The stamps I have, I bought years ago - by now, they don't cover current letter prices. I wind up putting too much postage on the letters, because I'm not going to go buy even more stamps that I probably won't need...

> it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author.

Indeed.

The author also seems unaware that a 1991 document could not contain a Web address because the world wide web did not exist yet. They guess it is because it is not widely available. That astonished me.

I mean, yes it reads a little awkward, but not too long ago I had misplaced the stack of envelopes + stamps I keep in my desk drawer and I needed to send something by snail mail (hey, remember that term?) and yeah. I am not someone who takes notes on paper, so I'm holding a pen only about once a week (the years quoted in the article sounds weird even to me) and it was a bit of a task (the whole sending, this time, not the writing). Bonus points for trying to use up old stamps when they're constantly changing the needed amount every couple years - so I usually need to put about 3 stamps even for local postage. But I guess that's just because I'm cheap and don't want to buy "new" code stamps when I have about 20 EUR in old stamps I can still use up.

Always interesting discussions with my wife who works in an office where paper mail, fax machines, and signing things on paper all happen multiple times every single day.

Man. I am generation-X, from a time when teachers would take the kids to a local post office and teach them how to send a letter and a telegram. And yet, while I have a vague idea of how could I send a letter nowadays, I would have absolutely no idea of how to send postage for the international return.

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