Hmmm, Prestel, Compuserve.....
Hmmm, Prestel, Compuserve.....
Its not up to us, there's a legal requirement to manage it. The local authority have a duty under Section 64 of the Town Improvement Clauses Act 1847 to maintain a system for naming streets and numbering houses in the area they are responsible for.
Chris
I would guess that 90% of missing mail is not the fault of the post office at all, it is the companies that are incapable of addressing mail properly. I must have had a small suitcase full delivered to me over the last 7 years I've stayed here. I will forward the previous owners mail and any sent because of a genuine blunder by the postie, (there is very little of either), but the rest goes in the bin. It is up to the companies that send them out to get their house in order.
Some more examples of the corporate mail sent to my address because of their ineptitude - Mobile phone bills, debt collectors letters, pre-payment electricity/gas cards, central heating contract details, employment interviews, a South African passport and the latest a HBOS debit card. Forget raking about in peoples bins for discarded mail in order to commit identity fraud, just get a flat in my street and wait for them to drop on your doormat.
Douglas.
Well yes my first Prestel decoder in 1982 only had a telephone style keypad and my Prestel ID was numeric. Viewdata and teletext were based around using a simple numeric keypad which made numeric ID's essential.
The same was true of Compuserve - except the bit after the at sign once they opened their Internet email gateway. We have since moved on to using alphanumeric addresses, just like a postcode.
Not up to us? I thought laws were made by our elected representatives?
-- Richard
But unless you contact the companies concerned and tell them there's no one relevant at your address, they'll probably send more - not least if/when the intended recipient rings the sender up and say that some expected item never arrived... and they send more out.
You'd be better off writing "not known at this address" on the envelopes and turfing them back into a post box.
I mean it has no mnemonic significance. It's just an arbitrary convention, unrelated to the name of the city.
-- Richard
My understanding was always that 021 to 061 (originally) were allocated to Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester alphabetically with only coincidental connection to the lettering on a phone dial.
It surely can't be coincidence that they're in alphabetical order.
I've never managed to elect one yet so they're not made by one of mine.
They could have been in alphabetical order without happening to fit the letters on successive numbers. I expect someone noticed the possibility and thought it was too good an opportunity to miss.
-- Richard
At a time when 1 was not used elsewhere to end an STD code the director areas (01, 021, 031, etc.) were AFAIR originally the only ones whose codes ended with a 1, later joined by the Tyneside (091) linked numbering scheme. The London director area was presumably exempted from the indignity of an identifying digit due to such an imposition being infra dig.
No mention of those identical strings of numbers that we used to see on mailings from diverse sources though.
DG
Having thought about it every STD code I used to know fits the lettering on a dial/keypad e.g.
0382 3 = D for dundee 0222 2 = C for cardiff, 0904 9 = Y for York and so on so I guess it's not coincidental at all.In message of Tue, 27 Sep 2005, Blackthorn writes
Ah! You're obviously a youngster.
It goes further than that. Letters were used in the first instance. In your examples above it was:
0DU2 OCA2 0YO4 (In those days of dial telephones the O was on the 0 key)Oxford started as 0OX2 but had to be changed because 00 was planed for future use (now in use of course).
David
Hm. Ever since I moved house I've had mail problems because the Church next door has exactly the same address as me, in a completely physically separate building. Same number in same street. We get each others' mail. Apart from that we both sometimes get batches of mail for completely different addresses. The postmen seem to rotate, and at least one of the semi-regulars is an alcoholic who is sometimes rather confused. The Post Office has several times acknowledged my complaints and said they would "speak to the postman" but it makes no difference. Some address databases get strangely contorted addresses for me by conflating the two. Some assume we must be distinguished by A & B or /1 /2 etc. which then makes some people think I live in block of flats or a basement. These days things like that affect credit ratings.
I've made phone calls and written a few letters to various bits of the council and the Post Office and become discouraged by ignorance and lethargy and circular "Not My Problem Try Them" trails. I have been advised that "nothing can be done about it because there aren't any spare numbers to give you or the Church a new adjacent number."
In the meanwhile, after ten years here, I still sometimes never get mail I know was posted to me. In one case it was an unexpected once only cheque from a company buy-out which I only learned about many years later, too late.
Any suggestions?
In message , Chris Malcolm writes
Could you not give your house a name:
Notachurch
12 Some Street Sillytown
Our house had a name when we moved in, and we had no difficulty in changing it to a different name. Can't you similarly change your number to a name of your choosing?
The A or B solution deserves careful consideration. You seem to be giving a lot of weight to the credit rating problem. Would that really be so bad, especially if (he says with 20/20 hindsight) you'd done when you moved in? If people thought you lived in a flat or basement (not that very many would, I'd've thought), how would that be problem?
Nope...
We have the same problem. Don't know why they have to have,
"xxx" Street "xxx" Way "xxx" Close "xxx" Road "XXX" Avenue
We in one of the above have our mail delivered to the other lot just round the corner with the same name. Not much fun especially as they are away quite a bit and our mail is on their doorstep;((
As above, complaining is a total waste of time......
BeanSmart website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.