Okay, get this.

The day after I picked up a package from FedEx because they couldn’t find the house I got a postcard from them.

It was asking us to call them up and let them know my proper address, since the one we gave them apparently doesn’t exist.

A postcard, folks. With our address written right there on the front. A postcard that was postmarked after we had already called on the issue. Worse: It was handwritten. That means somebody sat down and took the time to write out address out and then on the reverse side check the box asking us to provide them with our address.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

Okay, little educational primer here on the heels of my FedEx post. I figure if a guy that does it for a living can’t figure this stuff out some of y’all might benefit from this knowledge too.

Addresses 101

Those numbers on your mailbox weren’t delivered by a fairy. They’re calculated, and 99% of the time they make darned good sense too.

Somewhere in your area there’s what I’d call a “zero street”. Addresses to the north of it will be counting up, addresses to the south will also be counting up. If you live in a north/south street that’s why you’ve got “N” or “S” on there. It’s so the post office knows which side of that divide you live on. The same happens with east/west streets too. Heck, you can combine them into whacky combinations like “SE” and “NW” to identify which quadrant you live in.

Learn where these are. In the case of Grand Rapids, MI they are Division and Fuller. Where they intersect is the heart of our Cartesian plane.

Distance 101

Okay, so now that we know where our “zero streets” are how do we figure out were folks are? Well, addresses aren’t assigned randomly. There’s some simple math behind them. An increase of 1 in an address is about 2 meters in actual space along that axis.

In other words, if your address is 100 Main St. and the guy down the road from you is 200 Main St. you can pretty much assume that your driveways are just about 200 meters apart. The difference in the addresses is 100, multiple that by 2, and there’s your 200 meters.

You can also use this to find the offset of an address from a major street. If you’re living in an area where everything is a nice grid this works great. Roads are usually dropped at even intervals unless you’re in an old town or things are cramped.

The numerically named roads are easy. If you’re on 68th St. you are in the 6800 block. If a guy had a house right on the corner with a driveway matching up the street his address would be 6800. The distance that 68th street (6800 block) sits from 72nd street (7200 block) is: (7200-6800)* 2 meters. That’s 800 meters, or half a mile. So if you need to make a delivery to 7000 Pinewood you know that it’s exactly a quarter mile away from 68th street and 72nd street on Pinewood.

Now, when trying to figure out where a road like “Pinewood” actually is you just have to infer that from the addresses along a street that runs perpendicular from it. That’s just something you learn over time. So, if 68th St. and 72nd St. were east/west roads, and you knew that Pinewood, going north/south, was on the 1600 block, and you had an address of 1200 68th St. you’d know that the house was a quarter mile east (toward the center of town, the zero-street) of the intersection of 68th and Pinewood.

This is all stuff I learned when calculating, roughly,how far I’d ran back when I actually ran around towns.

One would think that delivery drivers would know how this, but maybe they don’t.

Now, onto the bigger scale of things:

Interstate Highways: Direction

Even numbers (I-94, I-80, etc) indicate east/west paths. Odd numbers (I-69, I-75) indicate north/south paths. Yes, they don’t always go in those cardinal directions, but for the most part you’re going one direction on them.

The exception to that rule is when the Interstate has 3 digits in it. That means you’re dealing with a short highway constructed just to deal with city traffic. If the first digit is odd you’re going to cut right through the city. I-196 here in Grand Rapids is a good example of that. If the first digit is even then you are going to go around the city. I-496 around Lansing is a good example of that one.

With a cursory glance at a map and that knowledge you can navigate your way across the entire US. It might not always give you the best route, but you will get there eventually.

Interstate Highways: Distance

The “zero point” for all interstate highways is the southwest corner of a state. If you enter a state from the east on an east/west highway and you are at exit 480 you have about 480 miles until you pop out on the other side. Likewise if you are traveling south on an interstate and you pass exit 80 you have about 80 miles until you hit the next state border.

Mile markers and exit numbers don’t walk hand-in-hand like addresses and street numbers do, but they are close enough to figured out your estimated time of arrival.

So, there you go. Road navigation 101.

Is it that hard to find my house? The USPS and UPS can do it. I’ve got some nice gold numbers up on the garage and the mailbox is marked. Heck, you could figure out where I live if you knew which sides of the road had the even addresses, which one had the odd ones, and used your car’s odometer to mark off the distance from the nearest major intersection.

But, no, you can’t find my friggen house.

Theresa ordered up a book from Apple last week before the 4th. It’s got a bunch our engagement photos in it. No, you can’t see them. I look like a retard. I can’t believe I actually found a woman to marry me.

Anyway, the local FedEx depot gets it in their mitts by Tuesday morning and send it out on a truck that very day. Theresa is excited!!!11!!! ZOMG PICTURES RELATED TO WEDDING!!!

Alas, FedEx tracking shows that there’s an error in the address that night. No book on the doorstep. She calls up and verifies that yes, they do in fact have the correct address. All the letters and numbers match up. FedEx asks if there’s anyway to clarify where we live.

Well, yes there is. She let them know which county we live in. The pizza place makes that mistake sometimes. When looking at our address (sans zip code) one could make that mistake. The pizza place doesn’t ask for a zip, but FedEx has it, so there’s really no reason for them to make a mistake.

Wdnesday night and it’s still not here. Theresa calls them up again. Theresa explains to the customer service agent that she called about this yesterday. Agent says she sees no record of that. Theresa again explains what county we live in. Agent goes to enter that in and… yep, there’s the note of the previous call.

I check on the package status during Thursday, today, while I’m working from home. At 5pm they still show it as being in an error state, never put back on a truck, and the address is wrong in their system. I call this time. Sure enough, they tell me that nobody’s called yet. I give directions to our house with a little more detail. She goes to enter it and then sees the two previous calls. Wanting them to actually get the job done I ask where the local depot is and guess what? It’s all of 7 miles from our house. The complete directions to get to here from there would look like this:

Go [this way] until you get to [X avenue], turn left, continue until you get to [my road], turn right, continue until you get to [my address].

Obviously, Rocket. Fucking. Science of the highest complexity.

I just drove over, told them I was her husband, showed that I had the same address as her on my driver’s license, and picked the package up.

If they hadn’t let me take the package home I would have hit the local super-market upon leaving, grabbed some sidewalk chalk, and decorated my rather large driveway with rather large lettering indicating FedEx’s inability to locate it for 3 freaking days.

I’m still pissed. I’ll be avoiding FedEx as much as I can in the future. I’m not saying you should, perish the thought. But, in the interest of getting packages closer to my house than a WWII bombing raid in heavy clouds could, I’ll pick somebody else.

Well, I think I found a new interesting use for the Jott.com service.

The power just dropped here which is great, because the in-laws are coming out tomorrow afternoon, so I’m really hoping this comes back. Storms) passed through about 24 hours ago, 36 hours ago and we just completely lost power. The entire block’s out, so this is fantastic.

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Update: Okay, power came back at like 3am.