This is Alpha, the first-born, when he was 2YO.
This is Beta, the second-born, when he was about 2YO.
This is Gamma, the third-born, when he was about 18MO.
Misdelivered Mail
Jan
12
2016
Occasionally, the post office will send us someone else’s letter. Sometimes the address is close, maybe off by one digit. Other times the address isn’t close at all, other than the ZIP code is the same.
In the past, I’ve written something on the envelope and stuck it back in the mailbox for the mailman to get and then he could see that it needed to be fixed.
Then I took the lazy way and just dropped it in one of the post office’s mail bins without writing anything on it. My thinking with that was that whatever glitch caused the letter to be routed to us wouldn’t happen twice in a row.
And it worked!
Once.
The next time I did that, the letter came back. So I gave it back to the post office. And the letter came back again.
The same thing happened with another misdelivered piece of mail. Twice I returned it and twice it appeared in our mail again.
But now I have found the secret – scribble over the bar code.
Now the wrong mail does not return to us.
Here’s my guess as to what happens: the automated sorter machine at the acceptance facility misreads the address and prints the wrong bar code at the bottom. All the subsequent stations find the bar code and don’t bother checking the address – they blindly trust the bar code.
When I put the letters back in the post office, I assumed they would read the address again. But they don’t, because the bar code is there. And the bar code tells them to send that letter to me.
So when I scribbled over the bar code, the machines had to reject it and then I assume a person had to manually sort the mail. It shouldn’t be any more annoying for them to manually sort that letter, since they would have to do that anyway if I put a note on it saying it was misdelivered.
If you really want to annoy people, I suppose you could take an black ink pen and a steady hand and extend some of the bar code lines so that it’s still a valid bar code but is delivered somewhere else. Visit the USPS’ page on their barcode for more information.
They said to the messengers who had come, “Thus you shall say to the men of Jabesh-gilead, ‘Tomorrow, by the time the sun is hot, you will have deliverance.’ ” So the messengers went and told the men of Jabesh; and they were glad.
1 Samuel 11:9
This little article thingy was written by Some Guy sometime around 6:51 am and has been carefully placed in the Mishaps category.
