march 17, 2010

neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night (or) this is a test.

i was reading i'm a stranger here myself by bill bryson some time ago in which i came across the following paragraph:

it happens that i had recently read an article on wordplay in the smithsonian magazine in which the author asserted that some puckish soul had once sent a letter addressed, with playful ambiguity, to:

HILL
JOHN
MASS

and it had gotten there after the postal authorities had worked out that it was to be read as "john underhill, andover, mass."

this i thought was very clever, and i wanted to believe the story, so i decided to do a little experiment of my own. i created twenty different postcards where the address was a connect-the-dots puzzle. the postal authorities connect the dots, the address appears, and in theory the postcard will reach its final destination, easy right? we drove all over seattle one evening, dropping half of them anonymously in the big blue mailboxes. we dropped the other half in olympia, tacoma, and gig harbor while on trips home, to insure the postcards saw as many different postal workers as possible.

now, you would assume that the usps, with a creed like this...

neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night, nor the winds of change, nor a nation challenged, will stay us from the swift completion of our appointed rounds. ever.

...would not have too much trouble filling in a middle-school level connect-the-dots puzzle, but you would be wrong. suddenly the stories of selfless postmen dutifully delivering letters and packages decades after they were originally mailed lost their awe. instead of applauding the efforts that eventually got the letters and packages delivered, i started wondering, "but why weren't they delivered in the first place?"

twenty postcards mailed, eight delivered. the part that kills me the most is the "ever" on the end of the usps creed. i think that may have been a typo, but then maybe i should just wait three more decades before i draw any real conclusions.

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