Yet Another Cycling Forum
General Category => The Knowledge => OT Knowledge => Topic started by: Wombat on 05 May, 2017, 08:31:29 am
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A bit of a weird one, but hey, its me...
If you live in a home with an address which doesn't really tell anyone very much, how do you cope with deliveries? I am in the process of buying a home in Wales, and its address has the house name, the village, and the postcode. That's it (no street, because its a linear one-street village) so how do delivery folk find the house? Presumably the postie has learnt them (so changing the house name, which is Welsh and doesn't exactly trip off my Hampshire born tongue easily, is not a good idea).
Presumably some folk here must have similarly uninformative addresses, so is it an issue for you?
I'm still recovering from the shock of finding its council tax band is an F! Ouch, that hurt, my current home is a C, and this one only has one more bedroom,so how did it get that far up the ladder? It is also detached, not semi, and has a garage, so maybe those both count.
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Seems to work as well as a normal address.
I've had *very* odd addresses - I lived on a mooring and my postal address was 'Willow, fulford reach moorings, postcode'. I put a postbox on a post and had parcels delivered to work. Intercepted the postie one morning and told him where the postbox was. No problem. Oh and had something delivered to back of boat once, should have gone to work but they actually drove down to the mooring, walked onto the pontoon and put it on the back of the boat. Bet that made the delivery driver's day.
The other postal address was on a farm with about 6 houses and I lived on a mooring. Post and parcels for some of the houses was put in an archway leading through to a courtyard. Delivery drivers coped.
I think it is easy enough on a one-street village because a delivery driver can ask a neighbour. Putting a prominent sign up with the name of your house helps.
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We have no real problem. Our village has no road name (so in some cases we us a fictitiuos one - "Main road" - as some online forms demand a road name. Of the 30 or 40 houses only 8 have numbers (a terrace of cottaages, of which ours is one) so our usual address is "8, Buckland" plus postcode. The only time we have a problem is when delivery people think they know where they're going, and don't use the postcodes! We have, within a mile, "8 Buckland Road, Buckland", "8 Wharf Row, Buckland" and "8 Buckland Wharf, London Road". All with totally different postcodes to ours.
EDIT: Re council tax band - check with your neighbours. When we moved in we we told ours was an "F" too - but in conversation with neighbours a year later, we found out another in the same terrace, a larger property than ours, was a "D", so we appealed, got re-graded and got a rebate.
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Of the 30 or 40 houses only 8 have numbers
In my far off couriering days, the only addresses that caused problems were the opposite to this; when one house in a numbered street had done away with its number and used a name instead (because it was occupied by a business and wanted to be known as Xyz Ltd, Xyz House, Suchandsuch Street).
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No problem here either. We have only a house name, but I guess that the couriers who work the area get to be pretty good at this sort of thing.
Do NOT change the name of your house. Ours is quite a large village, but some of the older or longer termed residents know all the house names in their immediate area.
The only people who have needed help are national carriers. Currys, firewood which comes up from Swansea etc. I just make sure they've got my mobile number so that if they need help, I can guide them in, even if I'm not actually in the house at the time.
If you've got a local pub or shop, you might want to introduce yourself.
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I didn't fancy changing the house name, as a) its not exactly how to fit in as a new English resident in Wales, and b) it seems a bit like the "its bad luck to change the name of a ship" sort of thing. I'll just keep practising it till I get it right. I'll be fine with the neighbours, only one of which is visible. I was slightly amused to note that the big house that is sort of next door, and is at least twice the size of "our" bungalow, is a G council tax banding, and most others are F or E. I've had a look at the listings on Gov.uk, and of course because they are names not numbers, I can't tell which is next door (the only other similar property in the village (actually I suppose its a hamlet), and which has a simply massive conservatory which Kew would be proud of (gardens, not steam museum). I'm not going back to look, as its a 400 mile round trip from here.
Now, to engage a remover who can cope with my lathe and milling machine, which are inconveniently in the workshop at the end of my 33m long garden with steps in! (Pickfords can't apparently, despite all those massive Pickfords low loaders we used to see hauling boilers and the like).
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There was a case a few years back of one householder in a street finding out his house was in a higher band than all his neighbours. He appealed and the result was all the other houses joined him in the higher band! The street was up in arms and baying for blood.
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I'd agree with Basil - it's generally not a problem. Regular delivery drivers will know the names. Big companies (e.g. Curry, DFS etc.) will probably phone in advance to ask where you are.
Definitely agree that you shouldn't change the name. (a) regular delivery drivers will know the old name, (b) residents that someone might stop to ask will know the old name (or possibly as 'the Roberts house' or something, regardless of how long ago the Roberts' moved out!), (c) in certain parts of Wales changing from a Welsh name to an English name will make you very unpopular indeed, (d) your house name might mean something.
An example of the latter is a house slightly up the hill from us. There are two houses - Dragon Isaf and Dragon Uchaf. I had wondered why it wasn't Draig Isaf and Draig Uchaf (Draig meaning Dragon, Isaf and Uchaf are lower and upper). Turns out that Dragon doesn't mean the fire-breathing beastie at all. It's a reference to being on the top of a massive hill - in a horse-pulled coach, it's the location where you would put the drag brake on in either direction. If you know this, it's really obvious in the village where the houses would be.
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Life would be so much simpler if we could put ICBM addresses on forms, rather than relying on secret squirrels local knowledge, or encouraging people to make phone calls while driving.
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Putting a prominent sign up with the name of your house helps.
+1 for that. Make sure it is at the end of the drive, clearly visible from either direction. And actually legible, not some fancy font or colours.
Around here there seems to a lot of houses without any sort of sign for the name/number. I'm not sure how they get stuff delivered. Or how will the emergency services find them in a hurry.
And you could make sure your house is mapped on OpenStreetMap, with the name/number/postcode.
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Not a problem for us either. House only has a name but we just say "first thatched cottage on the left after the pub."
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Local Indian takeaway charges £2 delivery for houses without numbers. I avoid that problem by not getting takeways. My street is simple, because there's only two houses on it, and typing the house name works in Google. I do sympathise with the next town over though, since none of the streets have numbered houses, hence – I suppose – the surcharge. They're too posh for tawdry house numbers.
I do get a lot of deliver drivers knocking on the door looking for addresses on the street above ours. I'm never sure why it's not obvious on the grounds (a) that it's different street name and (b) from the end of our drive the name of the street they're looking for is clearly visible on a handy roadsign sign.
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Buy a House number, 17 for example, put it on your gate.
Now you can have things delivered to No.17
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Not a delivery driver but I spent 5 years working night shifts for the GP out of hours service and rapidly grew to hate house names. Searching a road miles long for a name that's almost invisible at night. In urban areas the post code/ GPS will do the trick but in more rural places it was a bloody nightmare.
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I don't hate house names but I do hate the
occupants owners of said houses :demon:
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Most of the houses in our village have names not numbers and the postcodes are all scewed up as well. Doesnt seem to cause any issues with post or deliveries.
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My parents' house isn't even in a village really, but the house name + postcode seems to be sufficient (their house name in Welsh means "at the top of a bastard big hill", or something, which is a fairly good description of the location!).
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I live in the middle of
nowhere, rural Ireland and my house has no number, the lane it's on has no name, and there's even a lot of contention about what the area it's in is called.
However I still get my post simply because the postie knows everybody, but we always have problems if something is being delivered by a courier. More often than not I arrange to meet them somewhere nearby just to avoid trying to give directions "turn right at the old pump, over the hump back bridge, 200 yards further on... etc etc".
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In rural France the posties get to know who live where quite fast. However there is now a drive to put numbers on houses and someone is going round fixing them on official-like.
On cycle rides in the middle of nowhere houses are few and far between. It's remarkable how many houses are number 1 or 2 but not many with number 3 or more.
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Royal mail have a database with every delivery point, its address and exact location, including it the post box is on a post or whatever. As long as it is on address finder you'll be fine.
Sent from my XT1562 using Tapatalk
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I sympathise Wombat - we live on the outskirts of a fairly dispersed "hamlet" of about 17 houses, the majority of which are located off down a farm track, which is where SatNav or Google Maps always takes delivery drivers. We generally get found in the end - and it's better now we've improved signage by our front gate. However, this is the solution when trying to guide visitors:
https://what3words.com/
This bunch has divided the planet up into 3m x 3m grid squares and assigned 3 words to each square. Accordingly, you can pinpoint your front door, not just your house or street. I've used it to guide deliveries to the gate entrance to our sheep field which is in a mile long road with few obvious landmarks.
If people know how to use what3words then you can just give them a location like "curls.stewing.pirate"
Apparently Mongolia has adopted this for their postal service.
C
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Royal mail have a database with every delivery point, its address and exact location, including it the post box is on a post or whatever. As long as it is on address finder you'll be fine.
Royal Mail will cope, sure. It's the random couriers who only pay attention to what their satnav spits out in response to a 4-digit postcode who will struggle.
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I sympathise Wombat - we live on the outskirts of a fairly dispersed "hamlet" of about 17 houses, the majority of which are located off down a farm track, which is where SatNav or Google Maps always takes delivery drivers. We generally get found in the end - and it's better now we've improved signage by our front gate. However, this is the solution when trying to guide visitors:
https://what3words.com/
This bunch has divided the planet up into 3m x 3m grid squares and assigned 3 words to each square. Accordingly, you can pinpoint your front door, not just your house or street. I've used it to guide deliveries to the gate entrance to our sheep field which is in a mile long road with few obvious landmarks.
If people know how to use what3words then you can just give them a location like "curls.stewing.pirate"
Apparently Mongolia has adopted this for their postal service.
C
Apart from it being a bit harder to remember numbers, wtf is wrong with lat long?
what3words has the fundamental massive problem that given a pair of three words you have no idea how far apart they are.
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In rural France the posties get to know who live where quite fast. However there is now a drive to put numbers on houses and someone is going round fixing them on official-like.
On cycle rides in the middle of nowhere houses are few and far between. It's remarkable how many houses are number 1 or 2 but not many with number 3 or more.
Whereas in Poland the numbers go into the hundreds as the whole village is numbered in one sequence rather than street by street, so the address is $Village #Number.
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An example of the latter is a house slightly up the hill from us. There are two houses - Dragon Isaf and Dragon Uchaf. I had wondered why it wasn't Draig Isaf and Draig Uchaf (Draig meaning Dragon, Isaf and Uchaf are lower and upper). Turns out that Dragon doesn't mean the fire-breathing beastie at all. It's a reference to being on the top of a massive hill - in a horse-pulled coach, it's the location where you would put the drag brake on in either direction. If you know this, it's really obvious in the village where the houses would be.
I'm not sure I get this. Dragon Uchaf is obvious, but is Dragon Isaf the peak of a similar but smaller hill or is it the point at the bottom of the hill where you would release the drag?
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Apart from it being a bit harder to remember numbers, wtf is wrong with lat long?
Lack of error correction. Transpose a couple of digits in a latitude and you can end up at a plausible but wrong building. "curls.stweing.priate" is more obviously wrong at point of transcription, and an intelligent human with spelling skills may be able to recover the data.
what3words has the fundamental massive problem that given a pair of three words you have no idea how far apart they are.
I don't think that's a massive problem, unless you're testing for adjacency (which can always be done by resolving to lat/long and comparing). Most of the time you just want a unique identifier.
It's like saying that with domain names you've no idea whether hosts are on the same network segment.
The real problem is that the algorithm is proprietary. It's a good idea, but it'll never reach full usefulness unless it's free for anyone to include in their location-wrangling code. So DHL might accept it to address parcels, but it's unlikely to appear as an alternative coordinate format option on your eTrex.
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Apart from it being a bit harder to remember numbers, wtf is wrong with lat long?
Lack of error correction. Transpose a couple of digits in a latitude and you can end up at a plausible but wrong building. "curls.stweing.priate" is more obviously wrong at point of transcription, and an intelligent human with spelling skills may be able to recover the data.
what3words has the fundamental massive problem that given a pair of three words you have no idea how far apart they are.
I don't think that's a massive problem, unless you're testing for adjacency (which can always be done by resolving to lat/long and comparing). Most of the time you just want a unique identifier.
Say you are working on software that is doing something by locality, maybe checking house prices, or crime rates and your inputs are addresses using what3words.
Now the same software using inputs using addresses with latlong.
So, which is easier?
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In rural Finland (and Sweden) you can cycle for hours without seeing a dwelling then you come to (for example) no. 3429. It makes me wonder where no. 1 is.
Here's a map of a Finnish village with some wacky house numbers. Perhaps it makes sense to posti.
(http://i.imgur.com/vzPfWns.jpg)
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In rural Finland (and Sweden) you can cycle for hours without seeing a dwelling then you come to (for example) no. 3429. It makes me wonder where no. 1 is.
Belgium.
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In rural Finland (and Sweden) you can cycle for hours without seeing a dwelling then you come to (for example) no. 3429.
Correction: it was number 2866 I was thinking of (not far from Tepsa as it happens)
(http://i.imgur.com/Gdk2Sdh.jpg)
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Apart from it being a bit harder to remember numbers, wtf is wrong with lat long?
Lack of error correction. Transpose a couple of digits in a latitude and you can end up at a plausible but wrong building. "curls.stweing.priate" is more obviously wrong at point of transcription, and an intelligent human with spelling skills may be able to recover the data.
what3words has the fundamental massive problem that given a pair of three words you have no idea how far apart they are.
I don't think that's a massive problem, unless you're testing for adjacency (which can always be done by resolving to lat/long and comparing). Most of the time you just want a unique identifier.
Say you are working on software that is doing something by locality, maybe checking house prices, or crime rates and your inputs are addresses using what3words.
Now the same software using inputs using addresses with latlong.
So, which is easier?
For a human operator, probably the what3words. Not least because an invalid input can produce an error immediately, rather than generating bollocks output to investigate.
Sure there's an overhead for the computer to convert to lat/long internally, but computers are really good at doing tedious calculations, and spend most of their lives twiddling their electronic thumbs anyway.
Yes the programmer would have to do a bit more work to licence and include their algorithm. Which is why it would be better if it were open source. It's no worse than accepting postcodes.
In the real world, how often do *humans* compare lat/longs directly? Perhaps when navigating at sea? Obviously they would stick to lat/long.
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For a human operator, probably the what3words. Not least because an invalid input can produce an error immediately, rather than generating bollocks output to investigate.
Sure there's an overhead for the computer to convert to lat/long internally, but computers are really good at doing tedious calculations, and spend most of their lives twiddling their electronic thumbs anyway.
Yes the programmer would have to do a bit more work to licence and include their algorithm. Which is why it would be better if it were open source. It's no worse than accepting postcodes.
In the real world, how often do *humans* compare lat/longs directly? Perhaps when navigating at sea? Obviously they would stick to lat/long.
Not often.
But very often we compare postcodes. We know immediately that houses are in a similar locality or near a school, for example.
That becomes impossible with what3words. Not as easy with latlong as it is with postcodes. But a heck of a lot easier than it is with what3words.
Even with the 'block' postcode systems used by countries like Australia and the USA, the postcodes give you an immediate idea of locality. Latlong gives you an idea of locality. what3words gives you no idea at all.
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Post codes would strike me as being a better tool for comparison by humans than either what3words or lat/long. But that's not at all the kind of thing what3words was designed for; it's an address rather than a location. Lat/long or a grid reference (where there is one) would be a potentially more precise location and easier to find on a map, but also more error prone, harder to remember and harder to make sense of for people who are not familiar with the system; just as postal addresses rely on a combination of names and numbers rather than being purely numeric. If Amazon or whoever ever go ahead and deliver stuff by drone, lat/long would make more sense for that, but not for humans driving vans.
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Yes, that's a disadvantage. I suppose words could be selected so that dictionary order reflected physical adjacency, but that would likely reduce human memorability, which is what they're optimising for.
It's a good idea for solving a set of specific problems (particularly those that involve humans talking to each other about specific locations away from traditional landmarks). That doesn't mean it works well for everything, any more than WGS84 coordinates or a system based on the historical structure of the Royal Mail's sorting system does.
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What3words is handy for guiding someone to a location. You give them a website URL and tell them to enter worda.wordb.wordc and it shows them the location. That's easily done over a phone. It's less easy with Lat/long. You can enter lat/long into Google Maps in a number of formats, which in itself is a problem. Which format are you going to use over the phone (deg/min/sec, deg/decimal minutes, decimal degrees?) and will the recipient be able to take the details accurately and be able to handle a negative value successfully. What3words certainly isn't a perfect tool with respect to geographic adjacency, but it does work for quick transfer of memorable address. Most rural destinations are sufficiently wide to enable the user to pick one of several sets of words in order to find one that's more memorable.
If you select your location on the W3W map, you can right click, select "share pin location" and convert it to lat/long co-ordinates. Their map is also searchable using co-ordinates as is Google Maps.
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I spit on your decimal degrees! They are an abomination! :P
Probably invented by a programmer who was born post decimalisation of currency.
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I spit on your decimal degrees! They are an abomination! :P
Probably invented by a programmer who was born post decimalisation of currency.
Haha, yes - I'm sure Shackleton didn't use them. However, a full geographic second is something around 100ft - about 10x longer than the grids used by W3W, so you'd need to use decimal seconds at the very least to approach the same degree (no pun "in ten did") of accuracy I imagine.
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Life would be so much simpler if we could put ICBM addresses on forms, rather than relying on secret squirrels local knowledge, or encouraging people to make phone calls while driving.
I'd rather the ICBMs were targeted nowhere near my house, tyvm! :o
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:o
I spit on abominable postcodes. They are the worst of all worlds. There are a few, in very rural areas, that extend over miles.
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Open Location Codes (aka Plus codes) are a better option than What3words. The algorithm is all free and open source, so can be used in other software, and can work offline. Google Maps supports them, as does OsmAnd.
Also they have some useful features in that similar codes are close to each other, and they can be truncated if you don't need to be as exact.
https://plus.codes/
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Life would be so much simpler if we could put ICBM addresses on forms, rather than relying on secret squirrels local knowledge, or encouraging people to make phone calls while driving.
I'd rather the ICBMs were targeted nowhere near my house, tyvm! :o
And risk missing your lunch order (https://xkcd.com/1834/)?
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Life would be so much simpler if we could put ICBM addresses on forms, rather than relying on secret squirrels local knowledge, or encouraging people to make phone calls while driving.
I'd rather the ICBMs were targeted nowhere near my house, tyvm! :o
While HA3, HA7, HA8 & NW9 are all within a furlong of Queensbury Underground Station...
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Not a delivery driver but I spent 5 years working night shifts for the GP out of hours service and rapidly grew to hate house names. Searching a road miles long for a name that's almost invisible at night. In urban areas the post code/ GPS will do the trick but in more rural places it was a bloody nightmare.
Even in daytime it's a PITA. I work in Community Health Care. 2 mile long road, national speed limit, cars on your bumper and all you have is a house name, no fun and hugely inefficient on my time.
For deliveries it probably isn't too big a deal for you, but have you considered a plan just in case you were ill and needed an ambulance in a hurry?
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If your post code, entered into a satnav, takes you to close to your front door, a delivery person will get there. If additional help is needed include it in delivery notes. And make sure your house name is visible from the street, even at night.
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For deliveries it probably isn't too big a deal for you, but have you considered a plan just in case you were ill and needed an ambulance in a hurry?
First rule of thumb for emergency services is to use a landline where available. They should be able to automatically extract an address for it from a database. Of course, if your address is meaningless, I'm not sure that helps.
In theory an emergency operator should understand coordinates. In theory.
In practice I expect the coastguard and mountain rescue would be fluent in the usual formats (OS grid, WGS84 lat/long), and the others might get stuck at trying to convert degrees minutes and seconds to decimal degrees, or struggle to make sense of anything that's not a postcode.
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If your post code, entered into a satnav, takes you to close to your front door, a delivery person will get there. If additional help is needed include it in delivery notes. And make sure your house name is visible from the street, even at night.
Or get Chloe to task a satellite.
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For deliveries it probably isn't too big a deal for you, but have you considered a plan just in case you were ill and needed an ambulance in a hurry?
First rule of thumb for emergency services is to use a landline where available. They should be able to automatically extract an address for it from a database. Of course, if your address is meaningless, I'm not sure that helps.
In theory an emergency operator should understand coordinates. In theory.
In practice I expect the coastguard and mountain rescue would be fluent in the usual formats (OS grid, WGS84 lat/long), and the others might get stuck at trying to convert degrees minutes and seconds to decimal degrees, or struggle to make sense of anything that's not a postcode.
A few years ago Dad was a County Councillor* and was on the fire service committee or some such. As part of this he had a look round Surrey Fire and Rescue HQ where they demonstrated their location software. Dad's house has a name, no number. The firebod started typing the name in and before he'd completed it the Magic Fire Computer and zoomed in on Dad's house.
I understand mountain rescue teams also use a smart phone app, SARLOC, wot does this:
If the walker in trouble is using a smartphone, then he/she is sent a text message with a link to a webpage. Clicking on this link opens a page in the phone's browser which queries the phone to identify its location as a Lat/Long coordinate. This location data is then displayed to the user and automatically added over the internet to the Mountain Rescue Team's database.
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We stayed on Harris once. Or it may have been Lewis. Can't remember and without looking up my ride report can't remember the name of the village either. I know it was the day that we cycled with Windy. He came and met us. He would probably know where we were.
All the houses in the village had a house number. The trouble was that they seemed to have been numbered in the order in which they were built.
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over here in the US of A, at least my northwest corner of it, there seems to be a relentless urge to get everything on a grid from some imaginary 0,0 origin point in the county (subdivision of a state).
So, one's address is #### - ##th Street SW, or whatever; even in a rural area where the "street" or "avenue" is really a road without sidewalks (pavements), and ditches instead of gutters. Yes, relatively easy to locate, but all of the old road names fall into disuse, except for the ones for roads which obey topography and not the super-imposed Cartesian Grid. Occasional one sees a sign for "##th Ave NE" with an additional label for "Johnson Road" or whoever the original farmer was out that way. Old-timers still use the road names, but many of the young-uns are without a clue. "Jensen Road? Oh, NW 56th Avenue, except that after it bends it becomes 283rd Street NW ..."
In the state of Utah, street numbering is often based on a grid laid out from the original Mormon temple in the town. 2150 East 13400 South, etc. Once you learn how the grid works, you can find your way around.
For flatter areas over here, west of the original Colonies, the land survey system set up 6 mile by 6 mile "townships", with 1 mile by one mile "sections" to make it easier for homesteaders to claim and identify their 160 acre parcel. As a consequence, a one-mile grid of roads is very common. Many are labeled with letters east-west and numbers north-south. In towns, numbered streets one direction, and named in another, are common: names may be letters, trees in alphabetical order, or US Presidents in order of their rule. If there's a "Railroad Street", it's typically adjacent to the railroad line through town.
I suspect that all of these addressing systems are pretty easy to explain to Google Maps.
In days of not-so-long-ago-yore, many rural addresses were stated in a manner to make it easy for the Post Office to sort and deliver mail. Thus a house on the Nowheresville Highway might be Route 2, Box 151, Podunk, Your-State-Name-Here. The rural mail carrier for Route 2 - whichever roads it involved - knew where to find the mailbox.
And, Harris and Lewis - it was a bit puzzling to drive past the sign labeling the dividing line, without passing over water; one contiguous bit of rock, but different names depending on which end you were on.
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I understand mountain rescue teams also use a smart phone app, SARLOC, wot does this:
If the walker in trouble is using a smartphone, then he/she is sent a text message with a link to a webpage. Clicking on this link opens a page in the phone's browser which queries the phone to identify its location as a Lat/Long coordinate. This location data is then displayed to the user and automatically added over the internet to the Mountain Rescue Team's database.
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Ah, that's how that works.
A few years ago a friend was taken ill while we were walking on the island of Rum. Fortunately we were on the side facing the mainland and I got a good mobile signal (there's a mast above Mallaig I think). To get Mountain Rescue you have to call 999 and ask for the police, so I came through to some unfortunate operator in some call centre somewhere. They didn't have a clue where Rum was, and no, I didn't know the Postcode. "Someone will ring you back" they said. The "someone" was a very helpful policeman in Mallaig. He did know where Rum was, and understood Grid references. A coastguard helicopter came and took my friend to hospital.
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DPD had a delivery for me yesterday. I downloaded their app, which gave me the option of adding directions, other instructions, etc., and gave me updates as to the time to delivery.
Admittedly it was showing 15mins to delivery for 5mins after he'd been and gone, but it was generally helpful in reducing the window for waiting.
I expect other carriers will have similar—more-or-less—apps.
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The old Duke frequently had problems with Amazon deliveries1 whe he lived at Apsley House.
1:Lie.
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our road has one name at one end and another name at the other. GPS can bring you the house, down a neighbouring fen road, or to the nearby sewage pumping station.
We have a nameplate with house number and name - 17 California. However we also have a California House and a California Farm in the road. The number of couriers that see our name plate and try to deliver anything with that tag to us ::-). We have developed a mutual postage service up and down the road.
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We have developed a mutual postage service up and down the road.
I think that happens everywhere. Posties putting your immediate neighbour's letters through your letterbox is an understandable (and easily rectified) common mistake.
And then there are the handwriting issues. Brits are rubbish at disambiguating 1s and 7s. We regularly receive confidential medical information (and on one occasion a massive bulk order of stationery) for the GP surgery at the end of the road, because given sufficiently girly handwriting "1a" looks a lot like "12".
And then there's general sloppiness by experienced locals who aren't using the postcodes. We used to get taxis and pizza for n Cambridge Way when we lived at n Cambridge Road. Because obviously only the 'Cambridge' bit is salient. :facepalm:
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...because given sufficiently girly handwriting "1a" looks a lot like "12".
Next door to us is number "8 and a half".
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...because given sufficiently girly handwriting "1a" looks a lot like "12".
Next door to us is number "8 and a half".
Next door to 2, The Vale, NW11 is 0... I think it's named Zero but I suppose that's OT for this thread...
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A new house a couple of streets away from us is number zero. It's beyond, or before, number 1, so what else could it be? Luckily there's no room for any more buildings, unless they build over the side road, otherwise we'd be into negative numbers.
Edit: X-post with Heli: As per hers, it's actually written Zero, rather than 0.
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The side road, presumably, would have imaginary numbers...
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I think you're into a higher level of mathematics there, Kim, which I have certainly forgotten if I ever learnt it (all numbers are in a sense imaginary) and I wouldn't expect the postie to cope with either.
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Imaginary numbers are extra-imaginary, thobut, on account of being multiples of the square root of -1 (yes, that is a bit of a leap). They're frequently combined with real numbers to make complex numbers, often thought of as representing points on a plane with reals on one axis and imaginary numbers on the other. Hence the side road...
(It all seems a bit wanky, except they turn out to be useful for modelling real-world things like electricity. Which you could argue is itself imaginary.)
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Imaginary numbers are extra-imaginary, thobut, on account of being multiples of the square root of -1 (yes, that is a bit of a leap). They're frequently combined with real numbers to make complex numbers, often thought of as representing points on a plane with reals on one axis and imaginary numbers on the other. Hence the side road...
(It all seems a bit wanky, except they turn out to be useful for modelling real-world things like electricity. Which you could argue is itself imaginary.)
Electricity is entirely imaginary until you touch live and earth or neutral at the same time.
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[OT] I wish negative numbers were imaginary when they referred to a bank balance...
... or maybe not!
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The side road, presumably, would have imaginary numbers...
Aye ;D
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Imaginary numbers are extra-imaginary, thobut, on account of being multiples of the square root of -1 (yes, that is a bit of a leap). They're frequently combined with real numbers to make complex numbers, often thought of as representing points on a plane with reals on one axis and imaginary numbers on the other. Hence the side road...
(It all seems a bit wanky, except they turn out to be useful for modelling real-world things like electricity. Which you could argue is itself imaginary.)
Things like this make me think that in mathematics there is nothing that could not exist but an awful lot that should not.
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I can usually cope when finding my house, which has no number nor visible name.
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We have developed a mutual postage service up and down the road.
I think that happens everywhere. Posties putting your immediate neighbour's letters through your letterbox is an understandable (and easily rectified) common mistake.
And then there are the handwriting issues. Brits are rubbish at disambiguating 1s and 7s. We regularly receive confidential medical information (and on one occasion a massive bulk order of stationery) for the GP surgery at the end of the road, because given sufficiently girly handwriting "1a" looks a lot like "12".
And then there's general sloppiness by experienced locals who aren't using the postcodes. We used to get taxis and pizza for n Cambridge Way when we lived at n Cambridge Road. Because obviously only the 'Cambridge' bit is salient. :facepalm:
It's really fun when there's someone with a similar name to you nearby.
A while back I got a phone call from my local medical centre. It's a big place, with everything from routine checkups to major surgery. Anyway, I had a routine appointment a couple of days later so it wasn't a surprise for them to call to confirm, but it was a surprise for the voice to ask "is this the family of (my name)?". When I told them I was (my name) they got confused and realised something wasn't right. Apparently my namesake was in the hospital and, presumably, not doing very well. It nearly cost me my appointment because our records were muddled and the doctor I was seeing figured my namesake wasn't going to show up (given he was in a bad way in hospital), but in the end decided to leave the appointment on the books so she would have some free time. She was quite surprised when I showed up.
For good measure my mysterious namesake also appeared to be the same age as me, give or take a couple of months.
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Going back to addresses, in my part of rural Pennsylvania the house numbering is, well, interesting. It's far from rare for two adjacent houses to have house numbers 6-8 apart and sometimes you get a road with old and new numbering schemes. A friend of mine used to live at number 3807 (street) which was, as expected, just a few houses from another friend at 3847 (street). But half a dozen houses further up was number 168.
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I think we should use decimal points for newly-built houses.
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While old ones should be numbered on a system of twelfths, sixteenths and twentieths.
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We have developed a mutual postage service up and down the road.
I think that happens everywhere. Posties putting your immediate neighbour's letters through your letterbox is an understandable (and easily rectified) common mistake.
And then there are the handwriting issues. Brits are rubbish at disambiguating 1s and 7s. We regularly receive confidential medical information (and on one occasion a massive bulk order of stationery) for the GP surgery at the end of the road, because given sufficiently girly handwriting "1a" looks a lot like "12".
And then there's general sloppiness by experienced locals who aren't using the postcodes. We used to get taxis and pizza for n Cambridge Way when we lived at n Cambridge Road. Because obviously only the 'Cambridge' bit is salient. :facepalm:
It's really fun when there's someone with a similar name to you nearby.
A while back I got a phone call from my local medical centre. It's a big place, with everything from routine checkups to major surgery. Anyway, I had a routine appointment a couple of days later so it wasn't a surprise for them to call to confirm, but it was a surprise for the voice to ask "is this the family of (my name)?". When I told them I was (my name) they got confused and realised something wasn't right. Apparently my namesake was in the hospital and, presumably, not doing very well. It nearly cost me my appointment because our records were muddled and the doctor I was seeing figured my namesake wasn't going to show up (given he was in a bad way in hospital), but in the end decided to leave the appointment on the books so she would have some free time. She was quite surprised when I showed up.
For good measure my mysterious namesake also appeared to be the same age as me, give or take a couple of months.
At least I won't get that problem. As far as I can tell, I'm the only male with my surname in the world, and the only female with that surname is Mrs W. Negative aspect is that it makes it harder to avoid folk by saying, "oh no, you've got the wrong Mr Wombat, you must need the other one, sorry I've heard of him but don't know where he lives."
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I can usually cope when finding my house, which has no number nor visible name.
Usually?
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I can usually cope when finding my house, which has no number nor visible name.
Usually?
Depends on what state he's in, obs. After 12 pints at the Red Lion, it's easy. After a winter 300, it isn't.
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It's really fun when there's someone with a similar name to you nearby.
<stuff>
For good measure my mysterious namesake also appeared to be the same age as me, give or take a couple of months.
I faced severe embarrassment as a student when I examined a patient and discovered I had the wrong case notes.
The surname was a popular one, the age was similar but the medical notes suggested previous surgery from which no scars were evident.
Easily done, very dangerous.
This is not a lesson you might expect to learn as a medical student but the sooner the better in many ways, I suppose.
But 'Never Events' do occur.
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It's really fun when there's someone with a similar name to you nearby.
<stuff>
For good measure my mysterious namesake also appeared to be the same age as me, give or take a couple of months.
I faced severe embarrassment as a student when I examined a patient and discovered I had the wrong case notes.
The surname was a popular one, the age was similar but the medical notes suggested previous surgery from which no scars were evident.
Easily done, very dangerous.
This is not a lesson you might expect to learn as a medical student but the sooner the better in many ways, I suppose.
But 'Never Events' do occur.
Indeedy. My wife and my mother both have the same surname and they both have similar first names, such that the short version of one is the same as the other.
My mother visited the doctor (she would have been late 50's or early 60's' at the time) and the doctor pulled "her" notes which said that she was pregnant.
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One would hope that the dopiest of doctors might spot a date of birth inconsistent with a patient's appearance...
One would hope!
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Going back to addresses, in my part of rural Pennsylvania the house numbering is, well, interesting. It's far from rare for two adjacent houses to have house numbers 6-8 apart and sometimes you get a road with old and new numbering schemes. A friend of mine used to live at number 3807 (street) which was, as expected, just a few houses from another friend at 3847 (street). But half a dozen houses further up was number 168.
I'm sure there must be some kind of logic behind USAnian house numbering but I cannot for the life of me work out what. I know of a dead-end street with one building in it, numbered 825 ???
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Is it an office?
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I think some of the American systems are based on distance. Either distance from the end of the road, or from the official zero point, which may be on the other side of town.
eg number 825 is 825 feet along that road, or 8.25 miles from the zero point.
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That's quite a good system, allowing for new building in gaps without disrupting the number ordering and giving an indication as to where on a road you will find a particular building.
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I lived in a (fairly rural) county in California that used a county wide 6 digit house numbering system. Every privately owned parcel of land had a six digit number, starting with 000001 at the northern end of the county. Made lots of sense for emergency services, delivery services and others who needed to find an address quickly and on a regular basis, but it was a little bizarre to see a six digit house number on a street with two or three houses on it.
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I think some of the American systems are based on distance. Either distance from the end of the road, or from the official zero point, which may be on the other side of town.
eg number 825 is 825 feet along that road, or 8.25 miles from the zero point.
They do that in rural parts of Australia too, so e.g. number 123 would be 1230m from the start of the road. Makes life easy for emergency services. On long roads the numbering restarts at major landmarks to prevent ridiculous addresses.
I think some of the American oddities also come from some places requiring that (<number>, <street name>) pairs are unique at some administrative level (county perhaps?). So if you have two different John Streets in town, one of them will be numbered beginning with some large number. Another convention is that each block (in a grid system) adds e.g. 100 to the house number.
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Is it an office?
A motel.
I think some of the American systems are based on distance. Either distance from the end of the road, or from the official zero point, which may be on the other side of town.
eg number 825 is 825 feet along that road, or 8.25 miles from the zero point.
Aha! The "825 feet from the junction" thing sounds plausible. 8.25 miles from any point in town is known as "the middle of nowhere" so that one is less likely.
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I lived in a (fairly rural) county in California that used a county wide 6 digit house numbering system. Every privately owned parcel of land had a six digit number, starting with 000001 at the northern end of the county. Made lots of sense for emergency services, delivery services and others who needed to find an address quickly and on a regular basis, but it was a little bizarre to see a six digit house number on a street with two or three houses on it.
We've just come back from visiting my wife's brother in Texas, in a formerly-rural-but-now-increasingly-heavily-developed county that's basically a suburb of the Greater Dallas conurbation. I struggled a bit with the fact that they are - at #9865 - the second house you come to in a road with half a dozen houses on it, but on exploring their estate (sorry, neighbourhood) a bit more realised that every house seemed to have an 8-10xxx number. I'd assumed it was plot numbering and probably from the developer, but stemming from the local land registry would make more sense.
over here in the US of A, at least my northwest corner of it, there seems to be a relentless urge to get everything on a grid from some imaginary 0,0 origin point in the county (subdivision of a state).
So, one's address is #### - ##th Street SW, or whatever; even in a rural area where the "street" or "avenue" is really a road without sidewalks (pavements), and ditches instead of gutters.
Normal road names, thobut, and not laid out on a grid (at least, not within the greater one-mile grid) - though when you look on a map it's a *much* more logical layout than it feels on the ground. Disappointingly, no obvious theme to the names (3 British Prime Ministers doesn't really count, and I'm not quite sure how Mordor Lane fitted in).
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You can't think of three British prime ministers who would fit into Mordor? Really?!!! :o :D
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Most bizarre one yet yesterday. An LGV, looked like on of those "walking floor" trailers stopped outside the house.
Looking for "Top Farm", had the Road Name. We have a nameplate 17 Road Name. Do I look like a farmer, or a farmhouse? No yard, no tractors, closest thing being an old LR Disco.
The place he wanted was two doors up. With a name plate "Top Farm"
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The main problem with non-standard addresses is not so much the courier or postie being able to find it;
it's getting the retailer's crappy badly-translated-from-US-zipcodes web-form to accept it in the first place.
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Apparently 2679 Stratford Road, Solihull, is the highest street number in the UK. I used to work at no.141.
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A bit of a weird one, but hey, its me...
If you live in a home with an address which doesn't really tell anyone very much, how do you cope with deliveries? I am in the process of buying a home in Wales, and its address has the house name, the village, and the postcode. That's it
Welcome to baradwys :)
I live in such a place, at the end of a private track - no signs, not even my place (apart from a sticker on a blue plastic council recycling crate). The postcode covers a huge area of similar out of the way properties. The postie knows and all the 'relief' posties do too - they are also cognisant of my personal safe hiding places if I'm not in.
Most of the regular couriers are ofay too. Helps if one is always (addictively) ordering bicycle bits from companies who use different outfits. They all learn quickly as their time and drop count and non drop is money!
There was the case of buying some extra memory mudules for an Apple laptop from Apple in Ireland, which was delivered in a 7.5 ton TNT truck - and it couldn't get up the narrow and tree covered track! If they'd popped the thing in a 'jiffy' bag and posted it, all would have been well.
BUT when things go infrequently wrong - it doesn't help that we don't have mobile phone coverage in the Nantgwyant valley - which means the approaching roads for 3 miles southwest, 8 miles northeast and 10 miles northwest are no go phone areas.
I wouldn't swap this ever so mild inconvenience for the world :)
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It's really fun when there's someone with a similar name to you nearby.
<stuff>
For good measure my mysterious namesake also appeared to be the same age as me, give or take a couple of months.
I faced severe embarrassment as a student when I examined a patient and discovered I had the wrong case notes.
The surname was a popular one, the age was similar but the medical notes suggested previous surgery from which no scars were evident.
Easily done, very dangerous.
This is not a lesson you might expect to learn as a medical student but the sooner the better in many ways, I suppose.
But 'Never Events' do occur.
Sometimes a simple administrative slip can have that sort of consequence. A few years back I needed a vaccination as part of a visa application so duly trotted along to my GP to get the vaccination. When I turned up a couple of days later to get my medical records there was no sign of the vaccine, and the computer showed no sign of me having had it. Of course the vaccine stocks showed that it had been administered. I think the final conclusion was that someone immediately above or below me had been tagged with the vaccine I had received.
I can't help thinking of that situation when I hear of proposals to give politicians (of whatever party and at whatever level) more sweeping powers over our lives based on computer records.
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I think some of the American systems are based on distance. Either distance from the end of the road, or from the official zero point, which may be on the other side of town.
eg number 825 is 825 feet along that road, or 8.25 miles from the zero point.
Maybe some of them are. My neighbour on one side has a house number 8 below mine and the other side is 6 above. Their next door neighbour is 10 above, although the space between (x+10) and (x) is much smaller than the space between (x) and (x-6).
Leaving a few gaps in case another house is built in the middle makes sense (it seems so much more forward-thinking than having a street sequence that goes 11,13,15,15A,17,19 etc) but only makes sense if there is actually enough space in the middle to build new houses.
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It's really fun when there's someone with a similar name to you nearby.
<stuff>
For good measure my mysterious namesake also appeared to be the same age as me, give or take a couple of months.
I faced severe embarrassment as a student when I examined a patient and discovered I had the wrong case notes.
The surname was a popular one, the age was similar but the medical notes suggested previous surgery from which no scars were evident.
Easily done, very dangerous.
This is not a lesson you might expect to learn as a medical student but the sooner the better in many ways, I suppose.
But 'Never Events' do occur.
When I had a temporary NHS job as an orderly, back in my penniless student days, I was shown a short film. Some poor bugger had had the wrong leg amputated because of such a mix-up. And they still had to cut off the other one. He was rather depressed.
A few years later, when I had to have an abdominal operation, I was very pleased when a surgeon turned up in my ward before the op, checked with me that I was the person expecting X operation, looked at the visible signs that it was needed, then wrote on me what was to be done & drew lines with arrows pointing to them & "CUT HERE". :thumbsup:
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I don't think I ever saw an amputation occur without the patient getting a HUGE BLACK ARROW painted on the previous day, even if there was gangrene, with our without resident maggots...
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I don't think I ever saw an amputation occur without the patient getting a HUGE BLACK ARROW painted on the previous day, even if there was gangrene, with our without resident maggots...
One would hope not. Some years ago a friend of mine was in a motor accident and was taken to hospital. Apparently the staff there insisted they knew which foot needed attention. One was ripped open and dripping blood, the other one was perfectly fine. Sadly they were unable to spot the fairly obvious clue as to what was required.
I read a case (I think on BBC News) a few years back about a guy who went to hospital to have his tonsils removed. Due to a mix-up he was given a different procedure and, despite what one might have thought were obvious clues to him that what was about to be done to him was nothing to do with his tonsils, he apparently had the vasectomy planned for someone else. (This wasn't in the UK, I think it was in South America somewhere)
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Leaving a few gaps in case another house is built in the middle makes sense (it seems so much more forward-thinking than having a street sequence that goes 11,13,15,15A,17,19 etc) but only makes sense if there is actually enough space in the middle to build new houses.
Larrington Towers is numbered n and the neighbours to the north are, as one might expect of a street in Missis Kwin's BRITAIN, n+2. The southerly neighbour when I first moved here in 1996 was n-8, but n-6 was built not long after. I believe the architect of this curiosity to have been one Reichsmarschall Herman Göring.
Neither n-4 nor n-2 are likely to make a return as that would turn Larrington Gardens Road into a cul-de-sac
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A few years back there were two patients with my name at my doctors' surgery. I didn't know this until I saw my on-screen notes at one appointment and said 'Err, those aren't my notes, I'm not 5 ft 1 and 8 stone." Once the doctor had found my notes we had to go back through them checking everything was correct.
Bizarrely there was no note made of this problem and every time I went to the surgery I had to check they had the correct notes at the start of the consultation, for a sizeable percentage of the time they didn't.
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I think my street goes from #146 to #250 with no buildings intervening on the even side.
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(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DCS1nvcW0AAJm7G.jpg)
from the NLS map collection's twitter
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There are a few instances in the UK of 1/2 in house numbers - this (https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5049613,-0.0956497,3a,15y,225.42h,89.13t/data=!3m10!1e1!3m8!1ss0xAY61XwgcAQm2085u-Fw!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo0.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3Ds0xAY61XwgcAQm2085u-Fw%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D249.76367%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656!9m2!1b1!2i41) for one of the more central. Are there any 1/4? I don't think so but....
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There are a few instances in the UK of 1/2 in house numbers - this (https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5049613,-0.0956497,3a,15y,225.42h,89.13t/data=!3m10!1e1!3m8!1ss0xAY61XwgcAQm2085u-Fw!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo0.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3Ds0xAY61XwgcAQm2085u-Fw%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D249.76367%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656!9m2!1b1!2i41) for one of the more central. Are there any 1/4? I don't think so but....
I used to work in there!