Clearing the Decks

[kevin_standlee]

This afternoon and evening, Lisa has had me dealing with a lot of miscellaneous computer-based chores while she has me here. There's been more drive cloning, for instance. (She prefers that I do them because all of her computers have USB 1.x ports, so even if she has the drive-cloning software and external drive connectors, it could take days to clone a 320 GB drive.) Also, I'm scanning for her a bunch of the photos from the 2005 trip. She took these on disposable cameras and we had them developed at a shop near the Russell Square tube station. As I recall, it wasn't until well after the trip that I realized that we'd been going and coming through the area where one of the 11/7 bombings had happened only a few weeks earlier.

She also has been doing some shopping for used computers and parts. It's a pity we didn't have a chance to do some of this a couple of weeks ago, because so many places will only ship by UPS/FedEx, and Lisa hates shipping things to her father's house when I'm not around. The packages tend to get lost, and once she found neighborhood kids about to make off with a package that had been left on the doorstep. Stuff shipped to the PO Box doesn't have this problem, but it's very difficult to format an address in a way that UPS will deliver it to the post office. (It's apparently possible to do so, but many times the presence of a box number in the address will cause the shipper to balk even before shipping the package.) When Mehama's post office was inside the local hardware store it was much easier because we could give the address of the store and both shippers and shipping companies could understand it. Now that the local contract office has closed and the boxes for Mehama have been subsumed into a section of the neighboring Lyons office (it's less than 1 km away), shipping has gotten more difficult.

Comments

[k6rfm.livejournal.com]

Isn't there some way to tag UPS/FedEx shipments "must have signature"? I remember having to go through a dance with FedEx to file a "signature waiver" so they would leave *anything* on our porch...

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

Getting a must-have-signature might help, although the other problem is that her father isn't very good at understanding that some of the things shipped here aren't for him, and he'll open anything regardless of whether it has my or Lisa's name on it. That by itself isn't a problem, but sometimes if he doesn't understand why he got it, he'll put it away and forget he got it, and thus the item will be "lost" until we figure it out. For instance, we ordered something just before New Year that hadn't yet arrived, and I feared that he'd squirreled it away somewhere until we figured out last night that the vendor (for reasons still unclear because the item is in stock and my credit card is valid) had canceled the order without telling us.

When I'm here during normal business hours it's not a problem. There have been times when Lisa has had me ship things to my office (never a problem there) when the vendor must use UPS/FedEx, and then re-mail the package to the PO Box in Mehama, even though that of course takes longer and costs more, just to make sure the package gets here.

If I ran one of the small businesses here in town, I think I'd consider setting up a PMB service as an adjunct to the main business. Because Mehama is actually considered part of Stayton for postal purposes, it can be confusing to the non-postal carriers, it being 15 km east of what most people consider "Stayton." (I think the only reason it's not considered part of Lyons — which is right across the river — is because Lyons is in a different county.) We've had delivery problems a lot out here in the country, but a PMB inside of a recognized business that gets regular deliveries would probably work pretty well. Not that I have money to invest in such a business, of course.

[rono-60103.livejournal.com]

I'll admit to never quite understanding all of how the USPS defines "town" and maps their Zone Improvement Plan Code areas. But I've seen a few oddities.

When I lived in Illinois prior to getting married, I lived most of the time in Palatine. Palatine shared its ZIP code with neighbor Inverness. Inverness is much smaller than Palatine, but is also much more well to do. So as far as the USPS was concerned "Inverness" was the secondary city to "Palatine" for addresses to that ZIP code. But many shippers and bulk mailers would automatically substitute "Inverness" for "Palatine."

Then, not to far from where I work is a large neighborhood entirely contained within the city of San Diego. But any of the zip codes assigned to that area the preferred, and possibly only, city that is allowed is "La Jolla." I'm not 100% sure when San Diego annexed the La Jolla area - although Greg Binford used the annexation of La Jolla and a renaming of the local branch of the University of California as a time point during the 1961 or 1962 parts of Timescape (I think that is the name).

Of course sometimes it is people who get weird ideas about this, which don't pass basic sanity. I had a friend through college who lived on a short road in a neighborhood that shared its ZIP code with where we lived in Alameda (NM). The road he lived on was Academy, which was also the name of a much larger road in a different quadrant of Albuquerque (NE instead of NW) and never entered our ZIP code. But he remained convinced for as long as he lived there that if any mail was addressed to the city of "Albuquerque", the post office would deliver it to the wrong address, but if they used "Alameda" it would work. Where we lived, which was in the area considered Alameda, we always used "Albuquerque" on our addresses (and my parents still do).

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

*shudder* A number of my company's clients cannot get the zip code/city right on San Diego-area shipments. I think the USPS created a new Zip3 area there a while back, and it takes years for addresses to get corrected. This causes all manner of problems for me trying to do modeling and analysis, because we get a bunch of shipments going to an invalid location.

Some of the things the USPS does make sense, though; the 961* zip codes (one of the few non-contiguous Zip3 areas in the country), which is parts of Alpine, Lassen, and Modoc counties, is served out of Reno even though it's in California. This makes a great deal of sense if you know about the geography of this part of the state. (Indeed, it would make better geographic sense for California's eastern boundary to run along the crest of the Sierra Nevada, but that would put a good portion of Los Angeles' water supply in Nevada, which I suspect would be unpalatable to Angelenos.)

[buddykat.livejournal.com]

As a native of San Diego, as far as I knew, La Jolla had always been a part of the City of San Diego. According to Wikipedia, it was incorporated into the city in 1850.