Advice from a postal worker on Christmas cards

[andrewducker]

Advice about seasonal greeting cards from a friend of nwhyte who is a postal worker:

[this is specifically UK oriented, but most of it will apply in any country where end-of-year greeting cards and gifts are a big deal]

Okay, now that the Christmas card season is underway, allow me to offer some first-hand tips aimed at stopping your cards getting lost or damaged in the massive crush the Royal Mail endures at this time of year. Every day I see the stack of damaged cards in the mail centre, and I try not to think about the wasted effort, and possibly even heartbreak that it represents. It's easily avoided.

The less expensive cards have awful gum on the envelopes. Make sure the card is correctly sealed, and don't be afraid to use tape if you have to.

Never, and I mean NEVER send cash money through the post. We have all sorts of casuals in during the festive season, and they can't all be thoroughly vetted. It's easy to spot a letter with a banknote in it. Really.

Identify your letter simply and easily with your surname and postcode on the back. That's enough to track you down if something bad happens. That's a good tip for all mail anyway.

Try and post all of your cards at once, and stick a rubber band around them. Everyone concerned in the handling process will bless you, and it makes them easy to handle and process, and prevents random damage occurring to them in the early stages of handling. If you have no rubber bands, accost your postman. I guarantee he will have access to thousands.

ALWAYS take them to a post office if you can. The rubbish in mailboxes is dreadful during the party season. Just today I pulled a half-drunk can of Red Bull from a box full of mail, and of course, some of it was soaked. You see worse things too. Ghastly.

If you HAVE to use a post box, bear the following in mind: Don't post mail in the rain or snow. I have scooped many tragic handfuls of mail from boxes, posted by people who should really have known better. Post boxes are not waterproof. The older ones are better. The boxes in supermarkets are great too, as the mail goes straight into a bag, avoiding much scraping and pulling.

Here's one you might not have been able to work out for yourself: If you are using a post box at this time of year, leave it as close to the collection time as you can. REALLY don't post too early in the day. Why? Well, imagine a big metal tube full of letters, with the removal window at the bottom. Imagine all the weight on top of the bottom cards, the ones which have to be removed first. Perhaps ones with a "budget" flimsy envelope. The ones which have to be pulled through the opening guarded by a rusty, fifty year old wire frame. Do I have to complete the picture? The ones posted late are usually OK, because they don't have so many on top.

Despite this, please keep sending cards. This is a great time of year for us. I'm working 12 hour days at the moment, but everyone I meet is smiling, and chatting, and wishing me a happy Christmas. I'd love to think that folks were doing all they can to make sure all of their cards arrive at their correct destinations, and everyone has as happy a festive season as possible.

On behalf of all my colleagues at Royal Mail, have a very Merry Christmas, and, of course, a Happy New Year.

Comments

[cyprinella]

So do people in the UK not put return addresses on envelopes as a matter of course? That's been the standard in the US since I was a kid so at least 30 years.

[darkoshi]

That part of the post struck me as curious too. And how could simply a surname and postal code be enough to track someone down? Unless the U.K. postal service doesn't mind a lot of extra effort asking all the people in the area with the same name if the letter was theirs.

Edited to Add: Ah, I just remembered that U.K. postcodes aren't simple numbers like U.S. zip codes. And in looking up more info on them, the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom
says "Each postcode unit generally represents a street, part of a street, a single address, a group of properties,..."
So that would reduce the likelihood of multiple addresses with the same surname in a single postcode.

[doug]

Yeah, IME most UK people don't put return addresses on most letters. Although - like most places - we send a lot fewer letters than we used to.

A UK postcode typically covers 15 addresses. It can cover just a single address (especially large organisations) or I think up to 100, but about 15 is the situation for most domestic properties. So surname+postcode is usually enough to identify a single address. The advice I've had from staff in my local Post Office is to put surname, house number and postcode.

The current official advice on addressing post is quite different from what I was taught as a kid:
https://personal.help.royalmail.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/81/~/clear-addressing---how-to-address-your-mail

In particular, I was taught you needed a comma after the number in the first line ("1, Chapel Hill,"), should put commas at the end of each line, apart from the last, which warrants a full stop. Each line should be stepped in slightly from the one above. The advice now is no punctuation at all, and left-align. Capitalising the post town was a new idea and not quite the done thing, but acceptable if you cared more about your post arriving than the envelope looking right. The advice on return addresses was to omit them entirely, for fear that the Royal Mail would confuse it with the address you wanted the letter to go to.

[simont]

As a teenager, I used to live at number 4 in my street, and our post often got mixed up with number 41's, either because their post had a 1 small enough for postpeople to mistake for a comma, or because ours had a comma large enough for postpeople to mistake for a 1. So I can certainly see at least one rationale for advising no comma after the house number.

[doug]

Oh, absolutely, I totally understand why the modern advice is to skip punctuation entirely. In this context, punctuation just adds the potential for confusion and doesn't add anything to interpretability in this context. Particularly since most post is read and processed automatically these days, until the last mile bit where it's a human postie sticking things through letterboxes.

There's still confusion at that point in the process between similarly-named streets in the same area. Round my way there's Example Road, Example Close, Example Mews and Example Place all within half a mile of each other. Regular posties are fine but when you get a replacement - or one of the crappier parcel delivery companies - stray deliveries do happen. Really we ought to rename them but nobody has the stomach. We ought not to be allowing names that make it worse, though - Example Mews is a particularly frustrating example: a 90s infill development off Example Road that should never have been called that.

[darkoshi]

> The advice on return addresses was to omit them entirely, for fear that the Royal Mail would confuse it with the address you wanted the letter to go to.

Hah. That actually makes sense.

In the U.S., we put both addresses on the front, but the return address is generally written in smaller font (if handwriting) and in the upper left corner, while the addressee is written larger in the center bottom section. Some people even prefix them with "To:" and "From:".

[cyprinella]

USPS asks for similar things on their letters. No punctuation, standard abbreviations for street type (so using Dr instead of Drive), and I've even seen recommendations for how to form the numbers if you're handwriting. Makes it a lot easier for the machine sorters to read the address.

[cyprinella]

US Zip+4 would narrow it down a bit, but who remembers the +4? Unless you're typing it into a computer program that calculates it for you.

[splodgenoodles]

My Ex was a postie for a while, and in his quiet moments he made little people out of rubber bands. They are quite adorable (he gifted them to me, at my request, on our separation).

So yes, you can always ask the postie for one.

[birguslatro]

I'd heard a while back that return addresses on envelopes should be on the front and in the bottom-left corner (in NZ). On looking now though I see you're supposed to do this: "Write the return address in small letters on one line in the top left-hand corner or on the back of the envelope".

Some addresses would need very small hand writing!