During the run up to this Easter I sent my mother a varying amount of toy Easter chicks through the post, as if they were on a migration. There were 165 in total and I deliberately wrote all of the addresses differently to see if they would get through or not. I also got friends and colleagues to write the address so that handwriting was far from consistent. Postcode was definitely optional and to annoy my mother I added the address of the nearby council estate to the address.
All but one of them made 'the migration' in a timely fashion. However, a fortnight later my mum had a 'collect from the sorting office' note from the postman (or post service officer, in these PC times). This was for the last chick. By some accident this particular chick was standing up rather than lying down in the envelope making the package too large for 1st class mail. She had to pay ~£6 for the safe arrival of the last (165th) chick.
Incidentally they were all named and I emailed my father who could be expected on a given day. The first letters of their names obviously made up a 'happy easter' letter slightly longer than a 'tweet'.
This little experiment in novelty gift giving was dependent on those employed to manually sort the mail and their sharp brains. Yep, I deliberately gave them the run around! But it was all worth it. I for one will be sad when such prank-art-projects-via-post are no longer possible because the machines will have fully taken over.
> prank-art-projects-via-post are no longer possible because the machines will have fully taken over.
I'm not convinced that'll be the case - there are only so many heuristics one can plan with ahead of time. At the very least I'd hope they're not tempted to go for full automation at the cost of that very small minority of letters - that indulgence is possible precisely because postal services are public operations.
I guess what you need is too find two sorting machines, with either different OCR or differently calibrated cameras. Then write two addresses, one of which each machine can read, neither of which exists (or perhaps a 3rd that exists?).
Then watch the letter keep getting returned to the sorting office and loop the loop.
This was actually quite shocking. I clearly had not been to a Post Office in years. Needing variety in envelopes, 'Jiffy' bags and stamps I did try and get the stationary from the Post Office. But it cost an absolute fortune.
I thought envelopes cost mere pennies, a fraction of the price of a stamp. But no, at the Post Office they cost more than the stamps.
It was also costlier in time than I thought it would be, lunchtimes weren't grab-a-sandwich-and-sit-at-the-desk, I would be out for half an hour or more if a full postal visit was needed.
After a while I started buying stamps elsewhere and using the stack of envelopes I purchased some time back in 2007. In this way I could avoid spending inordinate amount of time in the dingy Post Office. A lot of the stamps I bought this way were really old, pre-dating the 2012 Olympics. I got the feeling that nobody is buying stamps any more.
Not so recently the post in the UK was delivered before people set off for their working day, then it all got a bit more casual. Then before that there was a time when people could have half a dozen or more separate deliveries in a day. It won't be long before we no longer have Saturday deliveries and envelopes become a quaint speciality item, generally available 'free' with birthday cards but otherwise as hard to obtain as perforated dot-matrix printer paper.
All but one of them made 'the migration' in a timely fashion. However, a fortnight later my mum had a 'collect from the sorting office' note from the postman (or post service officer, in these PC times). This was for the last chick. By some accident this particular chick was standing up rather than lying down in the envelope making the package too large for 1st class mail. She had to pay ~£6 for the safe arrival of the last (165th) chick.
Incidentally they were all named and I emailed my father who could be expected on a given day. The first letters of their names obviously made up a 'happy easter' letter slightly longer than a 'tweet'.
This little experiment in novelty gift giving was dependent on those employed to manually sort the mail and their sharp brains. Yep, I deliberately gave them the run around! But it was all worth it. I for one will be sad when such prank-art-projects-via-post are no longer possible because the machines will have fully taken over.