I live in an apartment building with north and south wings. Twice AT&T told me Uverse isn’t available here. But neighbors have it. We write apt. nos.: “N275.” AT&T’s computer has “275 North” and they couldn’t find it? (Senders who leave out the N are a problem, there are two 275s. Do they think it means “number?”)
Will do - hey…at least I’m honest.
Another interesting possible confusion - I was using a GPS to get into Philadelphia and eventually it told me to take the “Benjamin Franklin Branch”. I assume the data was entered as “Br” which the speech software translated as “branch” not “bridge”.
A house on a corner about two blocks away from where I live was torn down and a new one built on the spot. The front door was built facing the other street, so the realty company selling the house advertised it as having the old house number but new street. This would lead anyone looking for the house by street and house number to look around fruitlessly on my block for a non-existent house number. After getting bothered by people looking for this house and figuring out what had gone wrong, my husband told the realtors that you don’t get to make changes like that, and to talk to the town hall to figure out if they could reassign the property to the new cross street (but with a house number appropriate for the block it was on), or to put it back to the old address.
It’s possible in some subdivisions that if a realty company built everything, they might have labeled the street one thing when the Post Office was told/recorded something else.
They don’t deliver mail where I live. UPS seems to know my street address as they reliably deliver, but I have run into websites that don’t want to believe it exists, even when the package in question came UPS and arrived safely. And at work I can give you our street address for your GPS but it’s a crapshoot as to whether it’ll work, really, just drive into town and turn at the second (of three, small town) traffic lights and go a mile and we’re on the right.
Such a pain.
For some reason my house has two numbers, 305 My Avenue, and 1822 My Avenue. I guess there used to be one numbering system, and then they added a new one with higher numbers or something. We have always used 305 My Avenue as our address, I didn’t even know about the 1822 one for years, and usually mail arrives as it should. We also get mail for the 1822 address. However, because of this double number thing, there is another location of 305 My Avenue about a mile *south *of my house, and if you put 305 My Avenue into GPS or Google maps or anything like that, it will give you the *other *location! It’s caused quite a lot of confusion for delivery drivers!
Where I used to live, the street signs said “Mackay Crescent”
The street names written on the curbs said “McKay Crescent”
Somehow mail sent to either spelling got to us.
The part about the numbers in chronological order is an urban legend told and repeated by foreigners until people believe it.
Japan neighborhoods are named, much like cities or towns are named and they are usually divided into three or four divisions called “chome”. The blocks are numbered, and then the buildings or houses are numbered around the block.
So, for an example of an address near where I live, is Komaba 2 “chome,” block 3, house 5.
Several problems here. Because streets and blocks aren’t laid out in grids, then the blocks aren’t all in perfect order. Also, knowing the block number you are at will not help you immediately find a different “chome.” Once you find the right block, you just have to walk around until you find the address.
This is why even Japanese use maps. And, for some reason, very few buildings displays the number, so the name of the building or the house resident is required to find the address.
There is another problem. The building / house numbers were assigned when the plots were fairly large. As land prices rose, these large plots would be subdivided into smaller plots, but they can’t shift the building / house number, so several houses will have the exact same address. I share my address with seven other houses and two apartment buildings, all which were built on what had been a very rich man’s property 40 years ago.
This is an example of what I’m talking about.
We found this out when we moved in, and didn’t have our name on the mailbox yet. The pizza guy would have to call from his cell phone to ask which house we are.
A while back, I was trying to send a package to someone in the US. I used <number> Park Place <City> <State> <Zip>. It turns out that the correct address was on Park Place Drive, and that the town had two streets, one called “Park Place”, and the other called “Park Place Drive”, and I picked the wrong one.
Who comes up with these names?
Developers, mostly.
But more frequently nowadays, the local city/county clerk (pushed by the Post Office) are kicking back, refusing to register certain names if they are confusingly similar to other existing ones. Sometimes the Post Office will just plain state that they will refuse to deliver if they use those names (or actually, refuse to deliver unless the address on the envelope is exactly correct, which would eliminate a lot of mail).
Someone asked earlier, I live in a small city and there’s no other road named anything close to mine.
I got an email back from the Public Works Dept that said I should contact the Postmaster General because it is supposed to be Drive, not Street.
I wasn’t sure it was worth worrying about but this is a newly built house and I tried to sign up for Netflix last night only to have it say something like: “According to the Postal Service, this address is undeliverable. This is often due to it being recently built. Please try again later.” So, I figure I’ll call tomorrow and see if they could speed up the recognition of my address (I’m sure they can’t) and also mention the Street/Drive thing. I figure it’s easier for someone to fix now than in 50 years.
Ten years ago, I moved to a different house in the same neighborhood, so I thought I knew the area quite well. The new place was at 132 Bellvue Place. I knew the 5-digit ZIP code, but upon moving in, I went to USPS.gov to find the extra four digits for our new home. The website said something like, “No such street. Do you mean Bellevue Place?”
Everyone knows the street is spelled “Bellvue”! It says so on the street sign at the corner! But a few days later, I saw the street sign at the other end of the block. (This street was only one block long.) Lo and behold: Bellevue! In ten years of living in the neighborhood, I had never noticed this sign before, only the first one.
So I decided to go with the Postal Service’s opinion that the second sign was the correct one.
a street sign is a product of the person that made it. there are lots of stories of people in public works department making mistakes on signs and street markings.
The neighborhood my friend lives in Kawasaki City doesn’t use the chome system. Her old address in Tokyo did.
I bought a house a few years ago that I thought was at 123 Fake Place. In fact, according to the city, it is at 123 Fake Street Place. There is a Fake Street, but no other Fake Place, so I don’t know why it’s Fake Street Place. Perhaps because it branches off 18th St but there’s already a 19th St? It’s all on a grid and the development is from the 1950s, so it’s been like this for a long time.
For most usage 123 Fake Place works OK since that’s what’s on the street signs. Mostly, it mattered for all of the mortgage stuff. However, after reading this thread, I realized why Qwest wouldn’t offer me service. It says 123 Fake Pl is out of its area, but 123 Fake St Pl works fine now that I try it. Hmpf. I’m getting cable internet right now anyway, but interesting.
Once upon a time (1962) we moved into an apartment complex in Town A. Except the maps showed we were outside the city limits, and actually in Town B. But Town B said their city limits were at the end of the street, so we must be in Town C. They insisted their city limits were at the back of the apartment’s property line, and we were really in Town A. The confusion had us in three different cities, two zip codes, two school districts and a number of other jurisdictions until someone figured out that sloppy mapmakers had drawn the city limit along the creek just to our west, rather than along the grid line just to our east.
About 10 years ago, we won a Legislative seat away from the Republicans due to a similar mapping error.
First election after redistricting, and the new district lines included a city, and the rural area outside it, up to the road on the outskirts of the next city. But in one part, the district lines crossed over that road to pick up a large trailer park. (Presumably, the sizable number of residents there was needed – legislative district populations are supposed to be roughly equal).
However, the map illustrating the new districts showed the line as running along that road, without indicating the change for that trailer park. But one of our DFL volunteers, an elderly one who was no longer able to do physical things like door-knocking & lit-dropping, read the actual, lengthy text of the redistricting law, and noticed that this trailer park was included in the district, despite the error on the map. This was about 10 days before the election.
So our candidate and a group of volunteers hit that trailer park the weekend before the election, passing out sample ballots, campaign literature and talking to voters (including a lot of explaining on same-day voter registration). We were pretty much the only campaigning that those residents had seen all year – the opposing candidate had never been there. Either he had decided that these trailer park residents were not likely to vote for him, or (more likely) he had not realized they were voters in his district.
On election day, we turned out a few hundred voters from this area. And our candidate beat the Republican by just about 200 votes.
Apparently TokyoPlayer doesn’t know how addresses are assigned in other other parts of Japan, even across the river in Kawasaki City. I won’t disclose my friends address, but here is the address of a hotel in her neighborhood.
〒211-0012
神奈川県川崎市中原区 中丸子３８８
Which translates as:
〒 211-0012
Nakahara-ku, Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture, 388 Nakamaruko
I checked the adjacent address and 387 was on the same block, but 386 was several blocks away, so it doesn’t appear to numbered in the same block.
Yes, pretty stupid of me, isn’t it? Especially since I used to work down the street at
神奈川県川崎市中原区新丸子東２丁目２９５
Kawasaki-shi, nakahara-ku shinmaruko Higashi 2 “chome” 295. Should have spent those 4 years there thinking a little more, I guess.
295 refers to the block. 296 is the next block. We just used the building name after the 295.
Here ya’re, scroll down for a list of valid addresses for Nakamakuko. If you map the addresses, what you will not see is a “chronological order” of buildings.
Some places don’t have all of the components of the address. There are neighborhoods in Tokyo which also are not divided into “chome” the same as Nakamaruko. The same Nakahara-ku divides Shinmaruko Higashi into “chome” though.
Pretty much what you are getting is block numbers, although it’s not completely that 100% of the time. Maybe the streets have been changed, hell if I know.
Some places also omit the last number which I referred to in my post, and so you have to have the building name or the person’s name.
Before the Meiji Restoration, they didn’t use addresses at all. If you look at a pre-Meiji era map, there are cities, neighborhoods and then simply names of the property holders. At some point, they divided up into the block numbering system.
Need to add that in what are and were rural areas, then numbers were property numbers and not blocks. However, it appears that the numbering system was never completely systematic in all cases, but if you look at the numbering for the Nakamaruko, you can see it follows a geographic basis (pick some numbers from the low numbers, which are clumped together, then mid then high) and rather than completely scattered which you would expect in a chronological order.