this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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One time my uncle sent me a letter and couldn't remember the address of my place at the time, so he addressed it to, "White house a block away from the corner of [street] in [town, state]" and it made it here.
This was, obviously, well before you could just use Street View or whatever.
I attempted to find the article but search engines are terrible. They mentioned that advertising companies often have a book of mail tests; things they attempted to mail to see if they would be permitted. Some of the examples included:
A sock with an address written on it, partial addresses, wet paper, vague addresses like your example, local names like "sues bar", tom cruises house, a sandwich in a bag, poster board, flags. They get pretty creative and like a record of what might work for pitch meetings. Generally if it looks plausible, they attempt it.
"You know, the house next to the one that has that little cunt kid. You know the one. Always leaving his bike on the lawn, and being a real disrespectful little shit if you try to explain it's gonna get stolen in THIS neighborhood. The house next to that. The white one, not the blue one on the other side."
Mailman: "Oh. Yeah. I DO know that little fucker. Damn near tripped over his bike when it was covered in snow, and I didn't know it was there."
Costa Rica IRL
How Google Maps fixed India's street name problem
In Bangkok, "street names" are entire city quarters and houses are numbered chronologically by when they were built.
So it isn't unusual to have 237 be right next to 1550.
238 could be 2 miles away.
That sounds even more chaotic than the Japanese system.
they have a system?
What's that?
Complicated. There's the city, and it'll be broken into neighborhoods with their own names. Then that will be broken down into blocks (approximately) with their own numbers. Then each building has its own number within the block. So you can only find a place based on its address (assuming no online mapping) if you already know approximately where it is.
Before Google maps became a big thing, taxi drivers would have massive books full of neighborhood maps which they would refer to when you told them the address you wanted to go to.
At that point, why not write latitude and longitude and be done with it?
Yep, when we visited most of the houses had little names they would use for their address. Villa Bonita 200m S of xxx
Iceland, draw a map on it and the right name and that's all you really need.
As long as the address is specific enough to get through the right distribution center and to the right ending post office... chances are the carriers it ends up with will absolutely figure out where it needs to go.
USPS is amazing Where is their thin colored line? Real "boys in blue"
It's a thin yellow line exiting directly out of Louis DeJoy's dick hole
That or you give them every detail they need and they just don't bother.
Still mad that half my wedding invitations never made it to their ending destination.
The postal service is one of those things that's amazing the fact that half the things arrive at their intended destination knowing what is involved in the logistics of the whole thing.