As I mentioned in that recent story about the idiot who had allowed an it’s-a-fair-cop-I-did-it-where-do-I-pay £30 parking fine escalate into a £600-and-counting-here-come-the-bailiffs-again melodrama, I sometimes despair at the direction society seems to be heading.
When I write out my address on a letterhead or envelope (or when I complete any online form), it takes the format:
Mr Firstname Lastname
22 My Street North
The Estate
Cityname
XY12 2AB
You will note how each word is properly capitalised (and all of the post code). The advantage of such a clearly written address is that the blame for subsequently misdirected mail cannot lie with me, but rather with The Royal Mail, who seem to treat delivering letters and packages as something of a hindrance to all the other things they apparently do in their sorting offices. Indeed, they apparently have a failure rate of something like 1 in every 1,000 letters, and I firmly believe that most of these are mine, since I am losing an average of three or four letters or parcels every few months. And I also suspect that they aren’t making daily deliveries on my street, particularly where packages are involved (don’t even get me started on the speed with which they decide no one is home as you run down the stairs to answer the door and they’ve sprinted to the van and driven off, having left a poorly completed “while you were out” card on the door mat).
But back to addressing issues. In these modern times, it is very un-Teamworking to point out someone’s crap literacy, and as a result it has become common for people to use all capitals (ugly and messy), all lower case (ugly, messy, and stupid), random capitalisation (ugly, messy, lazy, and even more stupid), or any or all of the above with added txtspk (just stupid, full stop) when they post on forums, send emails, or – and this is where my point is heading – when they fill out online address forms.
Today, I printed out a postal label for someone after I sold an item on eBay. Their official eBay-registered postal address, if taken from the one I gave above, looks like this:
Firstname Lastname
22 my street north, The Estate
yname
CITYNAME
DEFAULT
Xy12 2ab
If it wasn’t for the fact that the postage labels are created securely I would have corrected it, but I can’t help wonder why someone would complete their eBay profile so poorly. It might get there – but if it doesn’t, it’s been played directly into The Royal Mail’s hands.