Badly Addressed Mail

Postal worker delivering mail

The Royal Mail have just introduced brand new walk-sequencing machines to sorting offices throughout theUK.

They are fantastic machines. They read the address, then sort the mail into the exact order they will be delivered in.

All a postal worker has to do these days is to pull a handful of letters out of the tray, and then to “throw them off” into the sorting frame. They are already in the sequence we are going to deliver them in, so it takes virtually no concentration whatsoever.

More time for workplace banter then, for discussing the football results and making jokes about your workmates’ numerous personality defects.

Sometimes, however, there is a letter which slips through the net, which evades the machine’s ability to read the correct address.

A few Christmas’s ago I had a Christmas Card addressed to Bill and Mary, The Big White House with the Double Garage, On the Corner Opposite the Oast House, the name of the village, and then the name of the county, which is Kent.

No walk sequencing machine would have stood a chance. Given a little thought on which of the Big White Houses opposite an Oast House it might have been (there were 2 Oast houses on my round) I delivered the card to who I thought was the most likely candidate.

A week after Christmas I saw the lady of the house and mentioned the card. She laughed and said yes it was for her. It was from some old friends of theirs who had only been to the house once. She had since rung, she said, and given her friends the proper address.

Here’s another story, from a colleague of mine. He’d only been a Postman for about 3 weeks, when a letter turned up that made him think that Royal Mail staff really must really care about the service.

The address read: Mrs V O’Brian, Windermere, Kent. Well there is no Windermere in Kent, of course, so the mail centre staff had looked up the nearest Delivery Office to have a Windermere Road. The name had not been recognised there and so written on the margins of the envelope was “try Tonbridge” then “not here, try Tunbridge Wells”, then “try Maidstone” and so on through 5 different towns until it had finally arrived on my friend’s desk.

As I said: 3 weeks a postman, he had no idea. So he showed it to one of the old lags who’d been in the job for 20 years or more.

“Oh yes,” he said, “that’s probably the woman at No.7, or her son up at 34. Give her a knock as she’s bound to be in.”

He did, and yes, it was her.

Another colleague told me this story. He said he had a letter addressed to a Miss so-an-so, the house with the blue door, down by the sea, near the sea front, and then the name of the town.

Like my other friend, he was new to the job, so he had no idea what to do.

Again he showed it to one of the old timers, who, by a spark of genius, recognised the name.

It wasn’t even her current name. It was her Maiden name. And the door had since been repainted. But the old postie, who knew most of the rounds in the office, and most of the customers, had a shrewd idea of who it might be.

“Try this,” he said, and gave my friend an address.

My friend delivered the letter, knocking on the door to find out, and it turned out to be the right person.

What are the chances of that?

All of which goes to show that local knowledge beats new technology when it comes to badly addressed mail.