Living in Spain I really learned to appreciate a well-working postal service which is ultimately a small, but meaningful factor in quality of life.
That said, the postal services are generally pretty good in Spain, but there's a big problem of addresses, and the very outdated databases that were true at one point, but someone since re-named the street two-three times already (or just made up a street name to get some process going, like to connect the electricity when the final street name wasn't given yet). Lots of houses have one official address (on the deed), one (or three) address that everyone knows it by. The street signs and even the house numbers are wrong sometimes. Our house currently has no less than five addresses, used with various providers.
What is the minimal possible UK address?
221–230 of 406 posts
Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#222I remember CGP Grey talked about staying with his wife's family in rural Hawaii, on his Cortex podcast. His address included something like "take a left at the big tree". The additional complication was that the USPS wouldn't deliver to the house, so they got a PO box, which is common in rural areas. But the USPS won't allow private carriers to deliver to PO boxes. So you need to use a different address depending on…
I recall that Costa Rican addresses are more like directions:
https://www.crcdaily.com/p/why-doesnt-costa-rica-use-real-ad...
Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#223Makes me wonder if we shouldn't just assign each building a code. It could be quite short: four letters and four digits would give you nearly half a billion possibilities.
That’s exactly how Irish post codes work and only use 7 chars: https://www.eircode.ie/
Although a check digit would have been worth it IMO
Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#224Does anyone remember in old-timey puzzle books that you might have read as a kid, the example puzzles (maybe fictional) of how the British postal service would decode people's addresses expressed in rebus form?
Like:
HILL
----
MIKE
----
WOOD
They would say the post office cleverly got it delivered to Mike Underhill, Overwood UK.
I guess that was for a more leisurely, less efficient time.
Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#225Clearing out some old stuff from my grandparents, grandpa had at some point received a letter, from Stockholm, to their summer house in the woods addressed Thorvald The forest by
My parents, living in rural Norway, received a postcard simply addressed to their first names, Norway. It turned out they were the only couple with that exact combination of first names, and someone at the Norwegian Post were bored enough to ask the Folkeregisteret (the database in which all Norwegians are listed) whether there were any Jorunns living with any Ingolfs anywhere in the country.
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Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#226Some brilliant examples of postal detective work in Ireland documented here https://www.quora.com/Can-you-send-mail-in-Ireland-with-the-... . eg Petra Kindler and Donal Moore Unfortunately I forgot the street name but it's near a street named *Cul de Sac* The beautiful city of Waterford, well known for its kindly postmen IRELAND
There was a submission on here a while back with someone using weird addresses etc. One required a cross word to be filled in and it got delivered.
Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#227Olga was a famous doorkeeper at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. Students used to send her postcards from their journeys. It became so popular that it was enough to write "Olga, Sweden" for her to get the letters [0] (source in swedish). [0]: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Boberg
I once received a letter (while at Chalmers) from the US - it was addressed to S-41296
KTH's official address is just KTH, 100 44 Stockholm. But since the '10' prefix already implies Stockholm [1], you could feasibly shorten it to just '100 44'.
Actually, it looks like Chalmers is the same way - the address in the footer of their website is just "Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96 Gothenburg" (with the '41' prefix already implying Gothenburg).
[1] https://www.postnord.se/vara-verktyg/sok-postnummer-och-adre...
Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#228Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#229If you write to the DVLA (driver and vehicle licensing agency) they have various individual postcodes for different departments Eg SA99 1AR is vehicle customer services The whole of SA99 I'd dedicated to the DVLA, so simply SA99 on an envelope would probably get there, although written just DVLA would probably do that same.
Tangentially related, but I'm ordering a vehicle logbook from the DVLA at the moment. I'm a millennial/Gen-Z straddler, so it's been a real blast from the past-I-never-had. I need to pay for my tax online. In order to do that, I need a number which is found in my logbook (V5C), which I've lost. Can I do that online? Nope. To order a new log book, I need to fill out a V62 form and post it to the DVLA, along with a che…
For future reference, you can pay with a Postal Order, which you can get over the counter from any Post Office.
Re: What is the minimal possible UK address?
#230My parents used to successfully get mail addressed to "Green House, [name of lake], New Hampshire"
And I would receive mail to "[lastname] [ZIP + 4]" (when I lived in New York City).