Going Postal

[Kara]

It was returned as "undeliverable". Okay fine, the customer doesn't have a mailbox or doesn't have the mail person drop off the mail inside the building. What I didn't like was that the letter went back to the PO and instead of directing it to the PO Box they sent it back to me. Looked through the FAQs on the USPS website to see why they'd do such a stupid thing and it turns out that they only look at the address nearest the city, state and zip line.

I can't speak for the individual post offices and distribution centers, but our directive with something addressed like that is that if there is a street address AND a POB, there's one of 2 ways it's handled. If the POB and address are on the SAME line, we will only key the PO Box. If they are on 2 separate lines, like you addressed it, we are to ONLY use the one that appears second. So, addressed the way you did, the street address trumps the PO Box. If it was undeliverable or otherwise RTS, it goes back to the sender. We would never be able to use the POB unless it was listed UNDER the street address or on the same line as the street address (in which case, you might as well just use the PO Box).

When it comes to individual region-based mail distribution, I have no freakin clue how some people EVER get their mail. I get stuff on my screen from the deep south with:

JimBob Hatfield
1/2 mile east of tree stump on the highway

Seriously, what am I supposed to do with that? The mailman in Mayberry probably knows JimBob, hell, he's probably kinfolk. But that is not an address. One thing I also see a lot is, instead of "Roadkill, TN 12345," I get treated to "City." What the hell is that? What city? There are lots of cities in lots of states, not to mention worldwide. I've actually come to find out that this is a regional thing they do in some places where, if you are mailing something locally, within the same city, they just put "City" instead of writing out the same city, state, and zip. Which, I suppose, I can forgive. Except when the sender doesn't write their damned return address on the envelope. That's when I hit my lovely "Reject" button, which I have dubbed the "Fuck It" button, to let the local postmaster deal with it.

I mean, when I was in school, they taught us how to properly send mail and told us that the post office would absolutely not even bother delivering your letters if you didn't have the state abbreviation right. And I get people sending letters to people with addresses like "Main St" (no house number, POB, or anything else) and "corner of 1st and Broadway." Unless you are a, um, lady of the night a street corner is not a valid address (or business address). There are people who put the receiver's phone number in place of the zip code. And somehow, their mail gets delivered and has been getting delivered for years.

I never knew the mail could be such a headache. Eventually, I'll be numb to all this, but it's my second week so I still take a few seconds here and there to just stare at something on my screen and question society.

[SongsOfDragons]

We got confused a few weeks ago when we were sending a Christmas card to our friend in Japan, as when we looked up the format for Japanese addresses we found they reverse it to put the name last! Makes sense... then Housemate found a note at the bottom which read they're used to processing in Western order. After a little debate as to which format to use we decided to stick with Western - slightly more forgivable derp if we get it wrong...

The card got there regardless

All/Most envelopes in Australia have four little boxes in the bottom corner for their postcode equivalent; the same conundrum came up for me when I was sending something for my cousin who lives in Sydney and was writing their address on a plain Brit envelope. Code in the corner or under the address? O.o I can't remember what I did, but that got there too... ^^;;

[Dreamstalker]

Every so often I'll buy stuff from Japan, and while my name isn't on the mailbox (this complex has a complex where only people named on the lease can be listed on the mailbox), it gets to me because I have a good relationship with the mail carrier.

When he was on vacation, two packages got delivered and then taken back The problem arose when the PO couldn't find them and had no record of them on the route we live on (even though I could provide a tracking number of sorts, the shipper's name and address, and dates which another carrier confirmed for the first delivery). So I had proof of mailing, a neighbor and another USPS employee had 'proof' of delivery...but the parcels apparently vanished into thin air when they got back to the post office. I understand why they couldn't be RTS, but typical policy at my local branch dictates that undelivered (not undeliverable) parcels are held for a week. These vamoosed after two days.

[Chromatix]

The way it works in Japan is that it's listed prefecture-first if you write it in Japanese (with kanji and everything), and name-first if you write it in Roman script.

I think they've adopted that convention to avoid confusing the hell out of foreign post offices. There is already plenty to get confused about with Japanese addresses, such as the lack of a street name - instead each *block* has a number, and buildings are numbered within the block. There is usually no geographical ordering to the block number, so you would have to look it up in an index.

[Kit-Ginevra]

On another forum,I was the only Brit with a load of Americans-at Christmas card exchange time I got emails galore saying 'you haven't included the house number''or where's the street name'. Over here especially in the sticks,sometimes the address will be just House name,village name,county.For some reason Americans couldn't cope with this concept at all.