
Postman delivers 'somewhere in Sheffield' parcel - blacktulip
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-52395609
======
ilamont
There used to be a printed magazine called "Spy" in the 80s and 90s that did
various pranks and experiments with the U.S. mail. One of them involved
sending mail to people across the country with missing elements like zip
codes, street names, and states and seeing if it arrived. I remember that mail
with just a name and zip code tended to get to its destination, even if the
street was not included.

Other Spy pranks included sending out bogus catalogues to freshmen congressmen
to see who would order coffee cups and T-shirts with ridiculous government-
themed slogans, and the famous expose of which billionaires would go through
the trouble of cashing progressively tinier checks ("Who is America's cheapest
Zillionaire?").

[https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-files-
spy...](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-files-spy-magazine-
prank/)

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

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

    
    
      36
      B30 1QR
    

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

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

~~~
jfk13
I'm aware that "house number + postcode" is often sufficient to uniquely
identify a property -- it works for my house, for example -- but I've wondered
if this is always the case. When I enter a postcode into my satnav, it
sometimes offers a choice of several street names, which seems to imply there
might be duplicate house numbers within the single postcode. But I've never
tried to confirm this -- do you know?

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

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

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5625027](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5625027)

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

------
Waterluvian
An item from China got a wrong postal code and was shipped to Northern Ontario
by accident. We got a phone call from a nice lady from a very rural post
office saying that they think there's a mistake, our package is targeted to a
long closed quarry.

We confirmed it was a mistake but that the package was literally a dollar of
baby safety latches and not to bother. Her response was an eager, "no! This is
the most exciting part of my week!"

~~~
tialaramex
Also the volume of material to be delivered is phenomenal. There's a
completely mercenary reason to try to deliver everything you can - storing
things costs money and you aren't in the storage business.

This is why I don't pay merchants for any sort of expedited delivery. I live
in a major port city. Any self-respecting delivery business has a depot in
this city - some have several, which means any products destined for me aren't
going via the far end of the country, or to a city I've never visited, they
are definitely coming here ASAP.

And once they are in that depot they are taking up space that the company pays
for. The sooner my package is on a truck and delivered, the less it cost to
store it, and the more profit they keep. Now, if I paid for the most expedited
delivery, perhaps my package would make it onto the very first truck and I'd
be the first stop and I'd be woken by an anxious delivery worker buzzing me.
If I ever need something for 0800 the next day I'll keep that in mind. But if
I'm a little bit more patient the next truck, or the one after, will have some
space and my package goes in that truck. Maybe if I'm unlucky the product
arrives at midday. Good enough.

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

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

------
tverbeure
Back in 1995, my buddy and I were on our post-graduation Great America
National Parks trip (17 of them, and 7000 miles of driving, in 3 weeks.)

We sent a whole bunch of postcards to the home front in Belgium.

One of them was sent to a friend who lived with his parents at a farm in
Schepdaal, a tiny hamlet close to Brussels.

The address was:

John Smith

Dear postman, we don’t know the address but it’s a farm at the end of the road
somewhere.

Schepdaal

Belgium

Of course it arrived.

------
qubex
I’m still very much a pen & paper kind of person; if there’s something worth
communicating, I prefer to break out the fountain pen and the writing paper.
I’ve got a drawer full of envelopes and stamps and I keep resupplying. I’m
also one of the few people who still sends (sent) postcards when travelling
(travelled) —all duly adjusted for the current state of affairs, of course—
mainly because sending a tangible item with a postmark and perhaps the GPS
coordinates of where you’re sending from is now a novelty.

Anyway, I have to say, my experience with flawed or incomplete addresses has
been very disappointing. Many people probably just pick up the unsolicited
commercial mail that drops into their inboxes in industrial quantities and
just discard it _en masse_ , probably with that tiny proportion of actual
‘valuable’ material inside.

The postal system really is quite amazing. We tend to think of it as archaic
but in reality it’s an enormously powerful, flexible, and efficient logistics
system that spans the planet. What never ceases to boggle my mind is how it
comes down to _people_ : when envelops go through the sorting facility, those
that are hard to parse with OCR are read by people (and it depends on the
legibility of your handwriting!), that last mile depends on a person, and
again, in this case, an anomaly was (successfully) managed by a person. It’s
all very touching.

~~~
Spooky23
A lot of the angst against the post office is fueled by various political
motivations. It’s one of the few remaining federal-ish organizations governed
by merit based civil service, which is the root of a lot of objections in
certain quarters. Exams don’t really care who you are or what you look like.

You also have other entities with their eyes on potentially lucrative
contracts for first class mail and other mandated carve outs like delivery to
Alaska. Similarly to how certain Senators from Pennsylvania are always
concerned about the National Weather Service giving away data that Accuweather
would like to sell, shippers would love to 10x the cost of delivering mail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
dilippkumar
I had an uncle who was famous in our family for his desire to test various
systems. It was only a matter of time before he decided he had to test the
postal service.

He picked up a postcard, wrote his initials and his last name and his zip
code, and dropped it off at a mail box when he was traveling.

The postcard found it's way to his house in Bangalore, India in the 1990s (if
I recall correctly).

~~~
enitihas
Delivering to Bangalore might be easier though. In a lot of places in Rural
India, house numbers simply do not exist, and addresses are of the form

Mr. ABCD S/O Mr, XYZ, Village <Village_Name>, postal code, city, state

The Village_Name part encompasses a very large area. The good thing is people
in rural areas know a lot of people by name, so asking a small number of
people for Mr. ABCD S/O Mr, XYZ turns out to be sufficient. But I often wonder
how challenging it is to deliver stuff with so much ambiguity.

~~~
Someone
[https://www.worldpress.org/Americas/592.cfm](https://www.worldpress.org/Americas/592.cfm)
claims _“From where the Chinese restaurant used to be, two blocks down, half a
block toward the lake, next door to the house where the yellow car is parked,
Managua, Nicaragua.”_ was a valid address at some time, and claims that works,
in Nicaragua.

Looking at Apple or Google Maps, it seems at least the major streets do have
names (¿nowadays?), though.

(Via [https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-a...](https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-
about-addresses/))

------
derefr
I feel like being a postman is a pretty sucky job nowadays (it’s essentially
the same time-pressured “throw the parcel at the door” service that FedEx and
UPS insist on, but for the government.)

But there’s a lot of _potential_ for it to be a good, rewarding job full of
community-building. And it used to be! Postal workers used to provide all
sorts of informal, impromptu community services, since they were one of the
few people in a town that would visit everyone in town, or in an area of town;
and so one of the few people in town who would know literally everybody.
Postal workers were asked to check up on people no one had seen in a while;
asked to escort people’s children to their relative’s house (which tabloids
called “mailing your children”); and many other “little” services that
nowadays have no real locus-of-responsibility on which to fall.

Maybe the problem is that there’s more mail to be delivered than there are
postal workers to deliver it; and we can’t afford, through our taxes, the
number of postal workers that would actually be required to deliver all the
mail while _also_ going above-and-beyond in all these other ways.

I wonder whether, in a world with Universal Basic Income, being a postal
worker would be seen as a vocation, like being a priest. Not something you do
for money; rather, something you do because you like the effect it has on your
community, and want to be a part of that effect. I have a feeling that there’d
be a lot more stories like this in such a world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
globular-toast
When I was a child I wrote a letter addressed to "Wallace and Gromit Ltd" and
a few weeks later I got a reply from Aardman Animations. I didn't think much
of it as a child but someone clearly did a bit of manual work to get that to
the right destination.

~~~
dylan604
Where do all of the letters mailed to "Santa Clause, North Pole" get sent?

~~~
ThinkingGuy
In the US, at least, a lot of them get forwarded the town of North Pole,
Alaska (postal code 99705).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole,_Alaska#In_popular_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Pole,_Alaska#In_popular_culture)

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

[https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/letters-from-
santa.htm](https://about.usps.com/holidaynews/letters-from-santa.htm)

------
netsharc
The Wikipedia page for Mojibake [0] used to have this image:
[https://soup.lithen.de/post/286150021/An-image-of-a-post-
env...](https://soup.lithen.de/post/286150021/An-image-of-a-post-envelope-
with) (sorry, one has to click "ignore the SSL security issue"), someone got a
Russian address to post a package to, but their email program decoded it using
the wrong charset. The Russian post managed to re-encode the address anyway.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake)

------
mkl
My grandmother once sent a letter to my parents, where they lived at the time
in Southland, a district of New Zealand. Unfortunately, Granny's writing was
never the clearest, and the letter was directed ~20,000km out of its way to
_Scotland_ , despite having insufficient stamps. The posties in Scotland were
unable to deliver it, unsurprisingly, but figured out the mistake and sent it
~20,000km back again, and it eventually reached my parents.

------
ddevault
Postal Experiments:

[https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i4/p...](https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i4/postal-6-4.php)

------
iron0013
Reminds me of the famous case of a letter addressed solely with a drawing of
Alfred E. Neuman being successfully delivered to the offices of Mad Magazine!

~~~
reaperducer
These sorts of things were once common.

Fans would send letters to Rip Torn by simply putting a little tear in the
envelope.

Chicago had a Sherman Hotel where the Thompson Center is now. People from the
south refused to write the name "Sherman," so the post office got used to
delivering letters addressed to things like "That hotel whose name must not be
written, Chicago."

Large post offices had entire departments of people to decode addresses back
then. Today the letter either gets bounced, or sent to the dead letter office.

~~~
ardy42
> Large post offices had entire departments of people to decode addresses back
> then. Today the letter either gets bounced, or sent to the dead letter
> office.

The costs of automation. Instead of communicating with a human who can be
flexible enough to joke with, you communicate with a machine you have to
rigidly and humorlessly conform to.

------
andai
I worked as a mailman last year and a lot of packages from China had
incomplete addresses -- but they all had mobile phone numbers. So a I'd send a
picture of the package to the number explaining the situation and asking for
the rest of the address.

~~~
em-bee
chinese package delivery companies generally won't accept a package for
sending without a phone number. on delivery the number is used to call the
recipient for personal handover. i am not happy about the privacy implications
but it does help to make sure that the package arrives

------
fotbr
A few years ago, I placed an order from a small company on the east coast, to
be shipped via USPS parcel post (ie, the cheapest and slowest option possible,
though the company does pay the extra for tracking). In a rush, I fat-fingered
the zip code. To compound the error, after submitting the order, their
shipping software helpfully "fixed" the bad zip code by adjusting the city and
state to match.

The next day, when they sent the shipping confirmation and tracking email, I
saw the error. Of course, contacting them was too late; they did ask that I
give the post office time to sort it out but were happy to send another one if
it was time critical. I opted to wait as the initial mistake was mine, not
theirs.

The package arrived a day later than expected, having gone to the small town
in the wrong state, been kicked back as "no such address", sent to some big
USPS facility in Chicago where they apparently figured out where it should go,
manually crossed out the bad city/state/zip and wrote a correct one in and
then came straight to me via the local post office, skipping the nearby
sorting center that most packages go through.

I don't know how they pulled that one off, especially in a pre-christmas
shipping glut, and without the package ever having had the correct address on
it until someone working for the postal service figured it out and fixed it.
Having a unique name probably helps, as does having a fairly unique street
address, but I'm still impressed it didn't just get tossed into the dead-
letter pile.

Living in the middle of the country, the post office's abilities are almost
magic. Need to send a letter anywhere in the US? Two or three days, for a few
cents (no idea what it costs now, I bought a few rolls of "forever" stamps at
40 cents apiece). Need to ship a package? USPS is often cheaper than UPS
ground, nearly always cheaper than FedEx ground, and faster than either of
them at still only two or three days. Same goes for receiving mail or
packages.

Quality of service of all three, I recognize, varies with location and people
involved. Around here though, it is damn hard to beat the post office.

~~~
justusthane
This reminds me of a similar experience I had recently, except with a
different outcome. A friend of mine in Chicago mailed a package to me in
Minnesota, but the post office accidentally entered his address instead of my
address on the shipping label (with my name).

So the package had my correct address handwritten on it, with the printed
shipping label bearing his address as both the return address and the delivery
address.

Should have been easy enough to figure out, but it was delayed for almost
three weeks while they figured out what to do with it.

Just proves your point about QoS really varying depending on the
people/locations involved.

------
hirundo
I once had a UPS driver deliver a package to me where my entire name and
address were so badly mangled that I had no idea how he did it. It was almost
random, looked like a base64 encoding, but wasn't. But he got it in one try.

It was about the same size as a few other recent deliveries I'd had, so maybe
that explained it. But I decided it was UPS ESP.

~~~
derefr
Perhaps the UPS logistics backend was fed a photo of the recipient address,
and did a likelihood analysis of what the text in the image could potentially
be OCRed to, given the places the sender usually sends stuff, the mass+volume
of the box, the content-type customs declaration (if any), etc.; and it ranked
your address as the first one to try.

Is that within the current state of the art—metadata-assisted OCR like that?

~~~
brianwawok
Who knows. I recently ordered a 12 foot long rug. It got delivered by fedex to
a lady across town. Neither the address nor the lady had anything to do with
me. Wasn’t like a one letter off thing.

Called fedex and they were like that’s weird. Let me call the driver. Like 4
days later the driver went to the ladies house, got it back, and brought it to
me.

~~~
tzs
I have a PO box in Poulsbo, WA, 98370.

I received something addressed to the box with the same number in Cleveland,
TN, 37320. That's off by 2600 miles.

The address was a printed label, not some badly scrawled barely legible
handwritten mess, and so poor handwriting recognition does not explain it.

~~~
ethbro
I think most postal routing does something akin to (initial read) -> (write
machine readable code) -> (internal mapping of code to location) -> (physical
routing).

And if it falls off the fast-path, remote human transcription is used at the
origination tagging step.

Expect even with error-tolerant encoding, sometimes the codes themselves get
corrupted (smudged, misread, etc). In which case mail ends up at (corrupted
code location) instead of expected. E.g. one bit-flip, which may or may not be
physically adjacent.

~~~
netsharc
Where I am it seems like online shops already have an API to work with the
post (surely UPS/FedEx too?). They would say using the API "I would like to
register a package addressed to [netsharc's address]", and the endpoint would
probably do that and respond with a barcode that the shop would print and
stick to the package. Then the postman would just scan the barcode when
picking up the package, take it to the sorting office where there'd be more
barcode scanning and automatic sorting based on the ZIP code stored in the
database entry identified by the barcode...

So the only reading of the actual typed address would be when the mailman
double-checks to confirm he's delivering the correct packages for my address.

------
Silhouette
Sometimes people working at big name services do the most remarkable things,
even in our increasingly automated and impersonal world. I also love that in
some countries, children can write to Santa before Christmas, and an "elf"
will get their letter and write back. It gives me hope for humanity. :-)

------
ToFab123
I am the only person in my country that has my name. I have a few times
received letters addressed to: First name, last name, country together with a
friendly message from the postal service to tell people to use my full address
next time.

------
lisper
In 1986 I was traveling through Europe after my senior year in college and met
an Irish girl in Munich named Fiona O'Reilly. She gave me her address. It was
something like:

    
    
      O'Reilly
      The house by the big tree
      Glenbrook
      County Cork, Ireland
    

She told me if I was ever in town that I could find the house by stopping
anyone on the street and asking where it was. So I did: I hitchhiked to
Glenbrook (you could do that in the 80's), stopped a random person on the
street, and asked where the O'Reilly house was. They knew.

Good times.

~~~
gerdesj
Good skills. I trust you were both lucky. Eire does have postcodes.
[https://www.eircode.ie/](https://www.eircode.ie/)

Now where is that big tree:

[https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.8623097,-8.3330293,3a,75y,...](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.8623097,-8.3330293,3a,75y,169.45h,86.25t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sgcEKFbJgaAKO0YD_TpZvdg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192)

~~~
lisper
I made up the "big tree" part. It was something like that but it wasn't that.
I don't remember what it was.

But it was Glenbrook. I wrote that part down in my journal. So yes, her house
was around that street view scene somewhere. I doubt I could find it again,
but the scene looks familiar even 35 years on. Not much seems to have changed
there.

~~~
gerdesj
It's a lovely story. I hope you have some great memories.

Sometimes I take a virtual wander around places I used to live courtesy of Mr
Google and his mapping thing. It is quite nice to see how places have moved on
after you knew them.

------
twic
My father told me that his Uncle Bill once got a letter that was addressed to
"Bill James, Wales".

Uncle Bill was a reasonably well-known rugby player at the time ('50s?), so
the post office knew it was most likely him!

------
gerdesj
Graham and Heather BFPO 40

Granny's Christmas card was delivered. Back then Rhein-d had quite a few
people in it. Wacky old West Germany, with Brits in it.

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

------
jamieweb
I wonder whether there were any negative repercussions for the postman? I'd be
surprised if there isn't a policy against personally contacting mail
recipients.

Surely it'd be some sort of data protection violation for him to have used the
data printed on the envelope to find the guy on Facebook and send him a
personal message?

Or is ad-hoc sleuthing allowed to a reasonable extent to ensure delivery of
mail?

This is cool though, maybe I'm just boring. :)

~~~
corin_
A policy against contacting mail recipients? They're already allowed to knock
on the doors of our homes to deliver something that doesn't fit through the
letterbox, or requires a signature...

~~~
jamieweb
I mean a policy against contacting them outside of their duties of work. This
is fairly standard practise for anybody with access to personal data as part
of their job.

I'm sure there's all sorts of problems, ranging from simple nosiness to people
snooping on previous partners or crushes, etc.

------
protomyth
This actually is the normal for me growing up, except it was UPS and,
occasionally, FedEx[1]. USPS doesn't deliver, ever. You rent a PO Box and that
should be good enough. If we knew it was UPS, we would have an address like
"House 311 Behind the School Loop". So, USPS delivers to PO Box and UPS would
find your house or just drop it off where you worked because they knew that
too. If a college won't accept applications from a PO Box then you don't get
to apply to that college[2].

This in the modern, internet era, has become a true pain in the rear. So,
somehow, somewhere, there is a list of street names for 911. This might or
might not correspond with the utility company's idea of location. There are
often no signs. To fix this, it seems a lot of websites and vendors are
starting to use a USPS website[3].

I seriously think we need an article in the spirit of the name article[4]:
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Addresses[5]. I would like to contribute
one: "The USPS Address Lookup Tool only shows addresses that the USPS itself
delivers and not all valid addresses for delivery."

So, all that work to find out a real address doesn't really matter if the USPS
doesn't actually deliver to that address, but UPS and FedEx are just fine.
Never mind the fun practice of handing off the package to USPS for final
delivery (looking at you DHL[6]) when the deliverable street address for
UPS/FedEx turns into an undeliverable address for the USPS who will send it
back unless you can convince your vendors to put the PO Box on line 2 of the
address.

Now, a normal person would think it might actually be an ok thing to get the
real address added to the USPS system, but that is currently a bit of an
exercise in phone tree spanning.

Can you guess what I have been doing during this current unpleasantness?

So, my fellow developers, please allow an override of your address checking.

1) oh, by the way, do not confuse FedEx and FedEx Ground when talking to
employees of said companies, they are quite hostile.

2) almost as good as the old "we don't accept money orders" for weeding out
those pesky poor people back in the day before debit cards and online
applications.

3) [https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-
lookup.htm?byaddress](https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?byaddress)

4) [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/)

5) I guess [https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-a...](https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-
about-addresses/) is it.

6) ah DHL, who somehow shipped a printer intended for North Dakota to another
tribal college in South Dakota (different tribe, different state) then had it
go to Chicago and then Compton CA to be handed off to USPS.

------
renewiltord
Hahaha, I thought it was going to be something fancy but it's freaking Kvikk
Lunsj. If you don't know what that is, it's Scandinavian Kit Kat. That makes
this even better.

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

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

