An exercise in the trivial -- International post package tracking numbers

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

When sending packages through the mail/post to another country, they seem to use a standard format: 2 letter characters, 9 numerical characters, and another two letter characters that represent the country of origin.

Today I realized that packages from the UK end in GB (presumably for Great Britain) instead of UK. This caused me to wonder whether there is a separate postal system in Northern Ireland (the biggest part of the UK that is not part of GB), so I looked it up, and there is. It’s called AN Post.

While looking that up, I found that in the US at least the first two letter characters are a code for the service level the package is being delivered under: first class, priority, priority express for example. That means that there are only 1 billion unique international package tracking numbers for each service level from the US.

So then I looked up about that, and found that tracking numbers are re-used after a few months.

So that was my rabbit hole for today. Do you have a recent rabbit hole that you’d like to share with us?

2

I spend way too much time on Mongolia Post’s what3words page. Every known address on Earth has been assigned a three word identifier. The fun thing is that if you change the language for that page, you do not get a translation of those three words, but a unique set of three words in the chosen language. I’d love to see those two facts as part of a plot in some police procedural, or at least in an escape room.

3

Is THAT what What3Words is about? I’ve seen it somewhere, over and over, and I just tuned it out because I didn’t know what it was. Now I know mine.

4

An Post is the postal service of Ireland. Northern Ireland has the Royal Mail just like the rest of the UK.

“GB” is the standard two-letter ISO code for the entire UK. (“UK” is reserved, though. If there’s ever an Upper Kazakhstan or something, it can’t be UK.)

5

I would guess Ukraine. In part also because the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign country that’s made up of more countries, and that the country codes just apply to Great Britain and Northern Ireland as separate units.

Similarly, I’d guess Greenland and Denmark have their own country codes despite being Parts of the Kingdom of Denmark. There are also maybe a couple islands near(ish) to New Zealand that may also do the same. I’ve never sent mail to Greenland though, so looking it up it does indeed have its own code (GL).

Oddly the Netherlands and Netherlands Antilles use the same code.

6

Yep. That’s what it’s about. I ran across it by someone suggesting its use for password or key phrases.