The story made me think of two things. First is my school, they had a huge shelving unit divided in ~4"x4" squares on the wall where all of the employee mail was placed.
Second was a story I read on hacker news fairly recently. There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area.
I recently discovered that all of the newly built houses in my street in Japan have the exact same address. I thought the delivery guys were just wankers when they asked 'where do you live', but apparently me and all my neighbors share the same address, so delivery people have only the nameplates on the doors to go on.
Don't understand why they didn't create new addresses when they subdivided these plots from 2 to 6 houses.
Addresses in Japan have always been perplexing to me as a visitor.
Tokyo has the x-y-z kind of grid system of increasing granularity, but then within the final level of granularity you kind of have to "know", or have a business card with a map on it to find anything. The building number addresses on a given street are more chronological than directional.
In spite of having been there a number of times, it was only GPS that got me to the point where I didn't need to basically give up finding something a few times a trip.
I can't find an image, but I was lost in Japan and had the address I needed, and a shopkeeper took out an ultra local map where each /shop/ was about the size of my thumb, to find where the address actually was.
> There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area.
There may be more than one, but Costa Rica is definitely addressed this way. A hotel I stayed in was 70 meters behind the church of Saint somebody, there was a great restaurant who was “near the old tree” (and everyone knew which one!). It was impressive.
>the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area
I imagine it's pretty uncommon these days especially after all the E911 rationalization of the past 2-3 decades. But when I was growing up in a hardly back of beyond Philadelphia suburb we had a rural delivery route which was just a street name.
I imagine most everyone at a university in the US these days still has a physical inbox of some sort. But working as a not-officially-remote worker at a company, you basically can't get a work package to me unless we make special arrangements. (I basically give you my home address on the rare times I need something physically delivered.)
> There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area.
Nicaragua and Costa Rica use a landmark based addressing system, where "From the park, 1 Block South" could be valid address.
> There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area.
This is definitely the case in India and I used to look for a postman when lost.
What did you think of the rest of the story?