
Postcard stamped in 1920 delivered 100 years later - benryon
https://www.fox17online.com/news/local-news/michigan/postcard-stamped-in-1920-delivered-100-years-later
======
js2
Years ago for my sister's 30th birthday, I did a fun project involving the
USPS.

I wanted to send her the message "Happy Belated Thirtieth Birthday!", which is
30 characters, via postcards, one character per postcard.

I found 30 post offices in unique places throughout the U.S. (For example, I
found a town that had the same name as her given name in Illinois. I found
another with my name, etc.)

I used Zazzle to print a custom post card for each location with a picture of
the location on one side, and a large block letter on the other. I just did a
Google image search at the time to find photos of the location. Here's the
image I used for "Truth or Consequences, NM":

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Truth_or...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Truth_or_Consequences_NM_-
_post_office.jpg)

I then hand wrote a message on each postcard that started with the block
letter. This was because she'd be receiving the postcards one-by-one and I
didn't want her to realize right away that a message was being spelled out. It
would seem like a postcard I might send her from that location if I'd actually
been there.

I also found a set of 50-state stamps the USPS had previously issued on eBay,
and used the correct state's stamp for its postcard.

Finally, I round-tripped each postcard through its respective post office by
mailing it inside an envelope addressed to the postmaster at that post office
along with a note to the post master:

 _Dear Postmaster:

I am mailing my sister 30 postcards from 30 towns for her 30th birthday. I
have enclosed a postcard, which I ask be hand-cancelled with a postmark from
your town. To protect the postcard from machine cancels in its journey through
the mail system, I have enclosed a stamped envelope addressed to my sister in
which to seal and mail the postcard. Thank you very much for your time! _

I wasn't sure if this would work, but damn if she didn't get all 30 postcards
each properly postmarked.

I dropped them all in the mail in NC. Some went as far as Alaska and Hawaii.

She received them in Miami. I think she got the first one within a few days
and the rest dribbled in over the next two weeks.

Edit: here they are after she received them all:

[https://ibb.co/YQfx4jZ](https://ibb.co/YQfx4jZ)

~~~
btilly
My mother did something like that, but as a prank on my brother who was at the
time in a military hospital. (This during the Vietnam days.)

What she did was got an atlas and identified every town whose name was at all
romantic. (Things like Loving, New Mexico.) The postcards that she had come
back appeared to be from random girls with as different as she could make the
handwriting to be. It was all timed to show up on Valentine's day.

After getting two stacks of postcards from girls with cryptic messages like,
"I hope to see you again" and "Visit any time", my brother got a reputation
for being a total stud.

~~~
js2
During my research I learned there's a Bridal Veil, Oregon which is a ghost
town except for a post office, which folks like to use to send their wedding
invitations.

[https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/why-brides-grooms-
are-f...](https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/why-brides-grooms-are-flocking-
tiny-post-office-n369271)

~~~
m463
Sounds like Loveland CO where my aunt said they remail valentine's postcards.

~~~
curiousgal
To be fair Loveland is by no means deserted.

------
philwelch
This is why it’s so important to measure p99 latency rather than maximum
latency.

~~~
sethammons
true, percentiles are important for telling you how your system is doing and
how typical users experience it. However, I contend that you should also
measure max latency, just that is is less important for understanding typical
usage. But seeing your max go crazy can signal that there is something else in
the stack that needs work. Silly example that I hit: max was consistently 2hr
on something that p99'd at like 1min and p50'd at 2 seconds. Dug in. The 2hr
was a default tcp timeout being tripped due to some connections not being
properly returned to the pool. Fix the pool logic and max times came down into
the few minute range. This also lowered p99.

~~~
philwelch
Good points.

To my point though, you mention that you noticed a "consistent" max of 2hr.
Meaning the consistency was the interesting part. You probably consider this
issue to be more important than some other hypothetical issue that caused,
say, literally a single request to have a 2hr latency on Tuesday.

In other words, if you monitored over a period that was long enough to
establish a statistically significant p99.9 or even p99.99 and then measured
those percentiles, you still would have not only caught this issue, but also
distinguished it from the other hypothetical issue. Monitoring your maximum
and worrying about consistently high maximums might be a more effective
mechanism, but in principle, you still care more about top percentiles.

~~~
eru
In sum: top percentiles are more important than the max; but monitoring the
max can still be useful.

Just like monitoring the arithmetic average ain't completely useless either.
It's just far from the most important metric.

------
TuringNYC
Like many office buildings in NYC, my employer's building had a system of air-
pressured mail tubes. I understand (now) that they are kept in some cases as
decoration, historical artifact, or due to the building being designated a
historical monument (not sure if internals are covered (?).

We didn't understand that as first, and several colleagues and I put postcards
and some expense reports into them. I can see the postcard arriving 100 years
later!

This was Accenture, and at the time, original receipts were required. Luckily
they made an exception on photocopied receipts when I explained what had
happened.

~~~
205guy
There was also a discussion of mail chutes in old buildings a while ago, and
many suffered from blockages (or being non-operational, as in your case). I
could see someone finally clearing out a blockage during a renovation, then
dropping the old letters in the mail. But the original article was a card
written between families, so probably not in an office building. The flea-
market theory from the article seems the most plausible.

~~~
5555624
I've lived in several apartment buildings that had a mail chute, from the top
floor to the first floor, next to the elevator. I don't know how often it was
checked for blockage; I think the USPS just picked up the mail form the box at
the bottom of the chute.

------
alex_g
The response from USPS is what I expected. It's unlikely this was in the
system for 100 years, but someone put it in the mail recently and the USPS
decided to deliver it.

~~~
ghaff
That seems almost certainly the case. It seems unlikely that any USPS sorting
facility or post office where this could have fallen behind something would
still be in use 100 years later (at least without extensive
renovations/changes).

~~~
golem14
Remember the USPS is rumored to have recently dismantled hundreds of sorting
machines. Entirely possible that some old mail was jammed in there somehow.

Also, cf. "Going Postal" by Terry Pratchett.

~~~
organsnyder
I had that initial thought as well, but there's no way those machines are
anywhere near a century old.

~~~
akiselev
The sorting machines themselves are certainly not, but the general
infrastructure around them sure can be. The World's Most Mechanized Post
Office video [1] was filmed circa 1959 and it shows a crazy level of
industrialization in the DC facility. Conveyor belts were invented in 1901 or
so and such systems can run for a very long time with proper maintenance - for
centuries even, replacing everything but the frame. Given how slowly
government usually moves, they must have built up to that scale over decades.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuvwoBb7gs4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuvwoBb7gs4)

------
seizethecheese
A lot of jokes on here about this being an improvement for USPS, or a
distraction.

The truth is that USPS performance has improved dramatically over the last two
weeks. You just haven't heard about that because there is very little appetite
for good news. See here:

[https://carriers.shipbob.com/#lp-pom-
block-1909](https://carriers.shipbob.com/#lp-pom-block-1909)

Our company (bottomless.com, YC W19) uses USPS to do real time delivery and
keeps a very close eye on arrival times. Our own internal arrival time data
has normalized considerably as well.

~~~
takeda
It is still worse than it was. Yesterday I got local mail that was mailed a
week ago and most of the time my mailbox is empty.

Their Informed Delivery service (where I can see what mail is being delivered
to me) now says my address is not covered, when it worked for me 2 months ago
(not sure when it was disabled, since recently I started worrying about lost
mail).

Before it all started, USPS actually operated really well, there were times I
got packages faster than through UPS (don't really use FedEx). Actually you
can see that from your site they were on average 2 days, when typically
everyone was expecting 3 days.

------
eusebius
I worked in the mail room of a dorm while in college. Part of the daily
routine was mindlessly marking things "return to sender," rarely noticing the
postmark date. In one instance (this was 2013) we received a pretty beat up
piece of mail that was clearly a Valentine's Day card. The postmark date was
"02 Feb 1999." Being very intrigued, I found a CV that seemed to belong to the
recipient (the CV indicated that they attended the university around the same
time) and emailed them. They expressed their gratitude and mentioned that the
card was from their now deceased grandparents. I of course forwarded the mail
to them. I've always wondered what kind of journey that piece of mail had... I
imagine part of it was stuck behind a desk somewhere.

------
thanatos519
In 2120, we'll be reading "votes sent by mail delivered 100 years later".

~~~
trhway
The post office will have time machine by then to get back and deliver on time
and change the temporarily altered history. May be we already living in that
alternative branch.

~~~
JadeNB
> May be we already living in that alternative branch.

You conjugated the future semiconditionally modified subinverted plagal past
subjunctive intentional incorrectly.

~~~
fuzzer37
I can't tell if this is a very elaborate grammar joke that I don't know enough
to understand or a troll.

~~~
JadeNB
> I can't tell if this is a very elaborate grammar joke that I don't know
> enough to understand or a troll.

Neither! (Or, rather, it's DNA's very elaborate grammar joke that I stole.)

[http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/guide.html](http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/guide.html)

------
marktangotango
I used to be in the habit of emailing myself links to read later. I once had
an email arrive at my gmail account 3 months after I sent it. That's like what
1000 years in internet time? :D

~~~
hk__2
There are a couple services that allow you to write a letter to your future
self and get it delivered in X months/years.

~~~
rkagerer
I had a substitute high school teacher one day who made us all write letters
to ourselves, then sent them to us like 20 years later long after we'd
forgotten about it. It was amazing!

~~~
curiousgal
Did you achieve all of what you hoped you'd do?

~~~
hk__2
I think it would be a great self-introspection exercise to “respond” to this
letter. You don’t even need a letter- just write to your past self and tell
him/her what you’ve achieved, what you’re proud of, what you wish you’d done
differently, what you’re unsure about for the future.

------
jameson
> In most cases these incidents do not involve mail that had been lost in our
> network and later found. What we typically find is that old letters and
> postcards – sometimes purchased at flea markets, antique shops and even
> online – are re-entered into our system. The end result is what we do best –
> as long as there is a deliverable address and postage, the card or letter
> gets delivered.

------
dumbfounder
We got one 50 years old a few years ago, but it was a return to sender because
the street no longer existed. It happened to be a Christmas card right around
Christmas.

~~~
amir734jj
Last year I bought a house and moved out of my apartment. So far I have
received 1) two stimulus checks for the two deceased owners of the house 2)
funeral home bills 3) family photos they sent and got returned

~~~
null_deref
The third one really got me sad, did you successfully sent it back to its
intended recipient?

~~~
IncRnd
How would you do that, burn them?

~~~
dstick
I think the correct word would be: sacrifice ;-)

~~~
IncRnd
Yes. Thank you. You are of course correct, and I appreciate you pointing that
out to me. Make them holy and sacred.

------
jagged-chisel
You get your postmark from the originating post office. If I drop something in
the mail here, the local post office marks the item (verifying & invalidating
the postage), perhaps encodes the address in the barcode at the bottom (I
don't recall whether that's centralized work or not), and sends it along its
merry way to the destination.

The postmark is obviously printed by a modern (impact?) printer. Why the post
office would accept a mailing with incorrect postage for current times is
notable - maybe someone making the call just shrugged it off an allowed it to
pass.

~~~
usefulcat
Sometimes they don’t notice that the postage is wrong, or even missing
entirely. I’ve heard stories of people drawing “stamps” on letters to see if
it would pass, and I know I’ve successfully mailed a letter without putting a
stamp on it at all (by accident, and was surprised that it was delivered).

------
wheybags
≥ Brittany says if she can’t find the family she’s gonna try and get it put
into the museum in Belding.

Wtf sort of professional journalist writes "gonna" in an article on a news
site?

~~~
judge2020
Might be verbatim, but then again there are no quotes. This is indeed local
news so actual writing and proofreading skills might be lesser than those of
national outlets.

------
uses
> We did reach out to the post office for comment and a spokesperson told me,
> “In most cases these incidents do not involve mail that had been lost in our
> network and later found. What we typically find is that old letters and
> postcards – sometimes purchased at flea markets, antique shops and even
> online – are re-entered into our system. The end result is what we do best –
> as long as there is a deliverable address and postage, the card or letter
> gets delivered.”

------
Jeaye
This is a good example of why eventual consistency is a weak guarantee.

------
janvdberg
Fun, but this is most likely fake. I.e. this card has not been laying at the
postoffice for 100 years.

In this case it seems particularly clear: look at the glue markings in the
middle of the card. This indicates this postcard probably has been sitting in
a collectors' album for quite some time, before someone thought of removing it
and pulling a joke.

This sort of thing happens all the time by people who post the card after it
has been sitting in a collection for some time. Since it is a valid card, the
post office will deliver it nonetheless. That's what they do! (Here's a Dutch
example: [https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/kerstkaart-na-ruim-halve-
eeuw-a...](https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/kerstkaart-na-ruim-halve-eeuw-alsnog-
bezorgd~aefe43da/))

Disclaimer: I checked this with an acclaimed philatelic collector.

------
GekkePrutser
It was addressed to Marty McFly!

~~~
JazzXP
I'm surprised I had to scroll this far for that comment. First thing I thought
of with the headline.

------
rafaelturk
I'm glad to see some improvement in the USPS

~~~
justwalt
That got an audible laugh out of me.

------
dozzman
> It was an old Halloween postcard

Are we sure this is not the plot to an upcoming horror film?

------
trentnix
“We have been trying to reach you about your car insurance...”

------
AniseAbyss
I read an interesting article on the USPS. They aren't just a threat to the US
elections, Europeans who live in the US and want to vote are screwed as well.
Next day delivery is not something that is guaranteed in every country.

------
worker767424
Sometimes I wonder what we've lost from not writing letters and using
Facebook. Reading this, maybe not all that much, and the long-distance
relationships we maintain have always been superficial.

------
quickthrower2
I wonder, in 2100 will there be a UDP packet delivered from 100 years ago?

~~~
paledot
Nope, but there'll be a TCP packet that's been re-sending over and over for
the past 100 years.

~~~
quickthrower2
But we’ll still be using IPv4 so all good!

------
devy
Am I the only one that think that might be a hoax? How is the post card be
preserved for a century without significant damages to it? Moisture, mold and
other nature situation would have destroyed it in a few decades. I really want
to hear the back story of this story.

Also, the address still EXISTS after a hundred years? No rezoning, no town
name change or street name change? Many rural houses built in 1920 would not
have survive 100 years without major overhauls.

------
fiftyacorn
Is this a distraction story from USPS?

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
I like the scepticism!

But the fact that the story was posted by the recipient of the post card, to a
Facebook Group, and then only hit the news after going viral means it probably
wasn't done by a PR company.

Having done some of this "black hat PR" myself I can tell you that we don't
typically cover our tracks that well.

We almost always plant bullshit by going to the news outlets themselves, or
paying a blogger to put up an article on BI, Forbes, of HuffPo.

On a completely unrelated note, have you guys heard Amazon is hiring 33,000
new employees with a compensation package average of 150k? Just to help with
unemployment during this time of crisis. Pretty cool of them to do that.

~~~
salemh
A blog post with your experience -even heavily redacted- would be interesting
on the black-hat PR/public opinion swaying as a separate topic if you ever
feel inclined.

------
wesllen
Wormate

------
credit_guy
I call shenanigans. There is a bar code on the bottom part of the postcard. It
has 65 bars. This is consistent with the Intelligent Mail Barcode that was
introduced in 2013. Prior to that there were different barcode standards,
Postnet and Planet, but neither had 65 bars, the highest number of bars that
Postnet had was 62, and they were short and long only. This barcode here has 4
types of bars: short, long up, long down, and long up-and-down; again this is
consistent with the IMB code.

By the way, barcodes were introduced to encode ZIP codes, and ZIP codes were
introduced in 1963.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Mail_barcode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Mail_barcode)

~~~
julianlam
> We did reach out to the post office for comment and a spokesperson told me,
> “In most cases these incidents do not involve mail that had been lost in our
> network and later found. What we typically find is that old letters and
> postcards – sometimes purchased at flea markets, antique shops and even
> online – are re-entered into our system. The end result is what we do best –
> as long as there is a deliverable address and postage, the card or letter
> gets delivered.”

A bit of a sensationalized headline. Just an old postcard, the postmark is
recent.

~~~
tantalor
> sensationalized headline

No, the postmark is 1920 according to the article.

See [https://i.imgur.com/r8HqDc2.png](https://i.imgur.com/r8HqDc2.png)

~~~
toby-
Can it not have multiple postmarks? The stamp at the top (which says 1920) and
the modern barcode underneath?

~~~
kube-system
The barcode is not a postmark, it's a machine readable version of the address

~~~
tialaramex
Nerdy nitpick: It might not be quite an "address". In the UK at least the
machine readable information (either added during sorting or printed
deliberately for a discount rate by bulk senders) indicates a _delivery point_
a place to which this post will be in fact delivered, distinct from an
address.

For example my address says Flat 7 of 60 My Street, and a friend lives at Flat
10 of 74 My Street. But _my_ delivery point is a letter box in the front door
of my home, whereas his delivery point is just a locked box at street level.
Timed locks allow the postman to enter my building despite not having a key,
so as to deliver post to my front door, whereas his building doesn't do this.

The company (almost everything in the UK is privatised because Tory ideology
says this is a good idea even if it clearly isn't) delivering post owns very
detailed maps of where all these delivery points are, because of course it
needs its employees to visit all those points to deliver post, whereas it
needn't care where in some sense an "address" is other than where the post is
to be delivered.

~~~
sib
Address (n): "a place where a person or organization may be communicated with"

~~~
tialaramex
Mmm. Where did you find that definition?

My (Collins) paper dictionary offers:

"The conventional form by which the location of a building is described" and
nothing close to what you've suggested.

Wiktionary offers:
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/address](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/address)

"A description of the location of a property, usually with at least [...]"

~~~
sib
Merriam-Webster:

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/address](https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/address)

------
hsnewman
Anti Post office propaganda?

------
mindcrime
I ordered a package of plastic worms (for bass fishing) back in June. They
were shipped from Texas on 06-21, and as of today (09-10), they still haven't
arrived (Chapel Hill, NC).

Yet strangely enough, the postal service tracking system updated the status
about a month ago, from "In Transit" to "In Transit - Arriving Late". Derp,
derp.

Anyway, I've pretty much given up on them at this point, but I wonder if like
100 years from now, or at some other arbitrary point in time down the line,
somebody who lives here after me is going to find a package of plastic worms
in the mailbox...

~~~
starpilot
I had a small package in customs in Chicago for three months recently. Seems
to be the norm in these times.

~~~
mindcrime
Yeah, I mean, I could understand something coming through customs. But this
particular package was something manufactured and shipped in Texas.

I did recently have a rather long wait for a book that was shipped from,
aaah... I think it was either Germany or England. I think it took about a
month and a half to arrive.

Of course I understand that COVID has had a major impact, but the one from
Texas still annoys me. I mean, c'mon... over two months from TX to NC? Give me
a break. :-(

------
simonebrunozzi
Speaking of USPS: I shipped a package from Japan to my home in San Francisco,
3 months ago. The package arrived two days ago. I opened it... And realized
the content has been "replaced" with junk books of (I assume) a similar weight
of the original.

The content was a few ceramic plates, a few books, some tea - nothing
particularly expensive, but these were items that we bought during our stay in
Japan.

I hate this. I hate the person or persons that have done this. I pretty much
feel my own person has been violated.

Also, knowing USPS, I'm certain that nothing will ever happen to these
THIEVES, and that there will be no easy way for me to force them to open an
investigation.

Sorry for the venting... But I somehow had to express this inner rage
somewhere, and when I saw this thread I couldn't resist.

~~~
Spooky23
You would be surprised.

Call the postal inspector office in your area. They take mail theft very
seriously.

