Thursday, February 17, 2011
Postman Pat
Today was the day we chose to deliver 150 or so letters for a residents' association that the BH used to be involved in prior to FIL's arrival on the scene. These 150 addresses are scattered more or less at random across the 3,000 or so addresses in the area in question. So not just a question of shoving one through every door.
Step 1: policy. We decide that, all things considered, the best thing to do is get the print shop to copy & fold the letters and then for the two of us to push them through letter boxes according to the list (see step 2). Decide against sticking the things in envelopes and addressing them. Decide against posting them. Having done the job, I think BH was right to overrule my advice. Hand delivery quicker than enveloping, addressing, stamping and posting would have been.
Step 2: create list of names and addresses from a spreadsheet originally derived from the Electoral Register. Remembering that each postcode is supposed to be something that a postman can conveniently walk around, decide to sort by postcode, rather than trying to do something clever with the first address line which contains both street number and street and which would not sort terribly well. Minor catch in that maybe 20 of the addresses did not have postcodes and appeared in a group at the end of the list.
Step 2: first quarter I do by myself in the car. This is quite slow and involves a lot of walking backwards and forwards to the car.
Step 3: second quarter we do together in the car. I walk about while BH drives about and supervises. Much faster.
Step 4: third quarter BH does by foot. This is the dense quarter clustered around our house.
Step 5: fourth and last quarter I do on the bicycle with a DIY clip board made of a scrap of hard board hanging around my neck and holding the address list, the supply of letters and a biro. All held together with two of the same sort of bulldog clips as I use as bicycle clips - that is to say the pale triangular ones with the folding arms, rather than the dark cylindrical ones with fixed arms.
Step 5: home to a well earned cuppa.
By the end of this little job one has quite a good idea how to go about it - although the plan is that there will not be a repeat.
I now know, for example, of all kinds of nooks and crannies in the ward which I did not know of before. Strange dog-legs on streets. Funny little tracks and alleys round the back of things.
I learned of the wide variety of housing in the ward. From the fairly grand to the fairly scruffy. Where either or both of house and front garden might be grand or scruffy. No high rise and not many flats. No dogs.
I learned of the wide variety of letter boxes - including here both the letter boxes which are actually holes in the door and those which really are boxes stuck up somewhere near the front door. These last are much easier to get post into as many of the holes require trickery to get light weight letters through. I got better at this with practise. Perhaps I will have a pow-pow with our postman about what sort of letter boxes he goes for and amend our letter box accordingly.
I learned of the wide variety of schemes for numbering the houses in streets. Some of which did not seem to have much rhyme or reason at all. One could, perhaps, engage the branch of mathematics which tries to impose order in the form of streets and numbering on connected but otherwise arbitrary networks in the Euclidean plane. For those with a taste for science fiction, one could move onto other kinds of plane. Maybe the surface of a Calibi-Yau manifold (8th December)?
I learned of the wide variety of numbers on houses. Or not. And some people like their house to be addressed by name rather than by number. Right pain. How on earth is one supposed to know where 'Mon Repos' is in a road of a hundred houses? Especially when the house sign is in small letters which you have to peer over the fence to decipher. Shouldn't be allowed; except perhaps in those odd places which do not number in a sensible way.
PS: lots of people seem to be chipping in with pop-up advice about how I should be setting up my new PC. Including various HP pop-ups. Maybe they will calm down after a few days or I will learn how to turn them off. Maybe I will get PayPal to work again. But that is probably not a new PC issue.
Step 1: policy. We decide that, all things considered, the best thing to do is get the print shop to copy & fold the letters and then for the two of us to push them through letter boxes according to the list (see step 2). Decide against sticking the things in envelopes and addressing them. Decide against posting them. Having done the job, I think BH was right to overrule my advice. Hand delivery quicker than enveloping, addressing, stamping and posting would have been.
Step 2: create list of names and addresses from a spreadsheet originally derived from the Electoral Register. Remembering that each postcode is supposed to be something that a postman can conveniently walk around, decide to sort by postcode, rather than trying to do something clever with the first address line which contains both street number and street and which would not sort terribly well. Minor catch in that maybe 20 of the addresses did not have postcodes and appeared in a group at the end of the list.
Step 2: first quarter I do by myself in the car. This is quite slow and involves a lot of walking backwards and forwards to the car.
Step 3: second quarter we do together in the car. I walk about while BH drives about and supervises. Much faster.
Step 4: third quarter BH does by foot. This is the dense quarter clustered around our house.
Step 5: fourth and last quarter I do on the bicycle with a DIY clip board made of a scrap of hard board hanging around my neck and holding the address list, the supply of letters and a biro. All held together with two of the same sort of bulldog clips as I use as bicycle clips - that is to say the pale triangular ones with the folding arms, rather than the dark cylindrical ones with fixed arms.
Step 5: home to a well earned cuppa.
By the end of this little job one has quite a good idea how to go about it - although the plan is that there will not be a repeat.
I now know, for example, of all kinds of nooks and crannies in the ward which I did not know of before. Strange dog-legs on streets. Funny little tracks and alleys round the back of things.
I learned of the wide variety of housing in the ward. From the fairly grand to the fairly scruffy. Where either or both of house and front garden might be grand or scruffy. No high rise and not many flats. No dogs.
I learned of the wide variety of letter boxes - including here both the letter boxes which are actually holes in the door and those which really are boxes stuck up somewhere near the front door. These last are much easier to get post into as many of the holes require trickery to get light weight letters through. I got better at this with practise. Perhaps I will have a pow-pow with our postman about what sort of letter boxes he goes for and amend our letter box accordingly.
I learned of the wide variety of schemes for numbering the houses in streets. Some of which did not seem to have much rhyme or reason at all. One could, perhaps, engage the branch of mathematics which tries to impose order in the form of streets and numbering on connected but otherwise arbitrary networks in the Euclidean plane. For those with a taste for science fiction, one could move onto other kinds of plane. Maybe the surface of a Calibi-Yau manifold (8th December)?
I learned of the wide variety of numbers on houses. Or not. And some people like their house to be addressed by name rather than by number. Right pain. How on earth is one supposed to know where 'Mon Repos' is in a road of a hundred houses? Especially when the house sign is in small letters which you have to peer over the fence to decipher. Shouldn't be allowed; except perhaps in those odd places which do not number in a sensible way.
PS: lots of people seem to be chipping in with pop-up advice about how I should be setting up my new PC. Including various HP pop-ups. Maybe they will calm down after a few days or I will learn how to turn them off. Maybe I will get PayPal to work again. But that is probably not a new PC issue.
# posted by Jim @ 9:23 AM 
