Odd designation for U.S. mail box name?
September 19, 2015 6:17 PM Subscribe
A new person moved into our building and the data he entered for his personal building mailbox is just a short series of alphabetical letters, dashes and numbers.
I guess I'm old fashioned but I thought you had to have your mail addressed to a person's name or a business name. What am I missing?
As far as I know, unless you have mail forwarding going on, USPS doesn't give a hoot what the name on the mail is. I regularly address mail to my grandparents to "The Grandparents", Address, City, ST ZIP
posted by jferg at 7:49 PM on September 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by jferg at 7:49 PM on September 19, 2015 [2 favorites]
Yeah, the USPS goes by address and doesn't care about the name. I sell online, and I've occasionally had orders to some pretty rude "names," probably as joke gifts. Gets there just fine.
posted by thebrokedown at 7:59 PM on September 19, 2015
posted by thebrokedown at 7:59 PM on September 19, 2015
Considering we have our name and street address on our mailbox and we get mail addressed to people who haven't lived here in 15 years -- and mail for people who never lived here, and mail for our neighbors, and mail for people who live on other streets -- I can assure you, the USPS does not care one bit what name is on a mailbox. Or, apparently, about the actual street address.
posted by erst at 9:28 PM on September 19, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by erst at 9:28 PM on September 19, 2015 [4 favorites]
Another possibility is that the apartment is being rented by a company or government org for short-term use by employees, and the code is just whatever designation they use to keep track of their rentals.
posted by contraption at 9:53 PM on September 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by contraption at 9:53 PM on September 19, 2015 [1 favorite]
Business names often are just strings of numbers. I frequently process cheques from bars and other businesses and the cheques have a name like 97853676 Inc. Then I have to play a matching game to figure out which of the seven or so companies like this sent me the cheque so I can apply it to the correct invoices. Sometimes (bless them) the cheque is marked 97853676 Inc. dba Salvatore's. It is so common to have a unique string of numbers for a registered business name that the letters dba are accepted as meaning "doing business as".
Companies that do not transact retail business do not need an easy to remember catching name. Things like family trusts that do nothing more than collect interest and disburse payments almost always have just a string of numbers for a name.
That said, your neighbour has dashes and letters in his name so his name is different than all those business names I see, but I don't believe there is any reason why you couldn't use a larger character set to come up with your business name, especially if your transactions got hand processed among a lot of other transactions in a crowded metropolitin area so you didn't want to be mistaken for 97856376 Inc.
Meanwhile, in the small Canadian city where I live when I first moved here twenty years ago some of my mail got returned because the mailman assumed that anyone living at my address had to have the surname Brown. As a result I had to post a long list of names on my mailbox including my spouses name, my author alias and our SCA names. It made it look like at least nine people lived in a three bedroom apartment.
posted by Jane the Brown at 4:44 AM on September 20, 2015 [4 favorites]
Companies that do not transact retail business do not need an easy to remember catching name. Things like family trusts that do nothing more than collect interest and disburse payments almost always have just a string of numbers for a name.
That said, your neighbour has dashes and letters in his name so his name is different than all those business names I see, but I don't believe there is any reason why you couldn't use a larger character set to come up with your business name, especially if your transactions got hand processed among a lot of other transactions in a crowded metropolitin area so you didn't want to be mistaken for 97856376 Inc.
Meanwhile, in the small Canadian city where I live when I first moved here twenty years ago some of my mail got returned because the mailman assumed that anyone living at my address had to have the surname Brown. As a result I had to post a long list of names on my mailbox including my spouses name, my author alias and our SCA names. It made it look like at least nine people lived in a three bedroom apartment.
posted by Jane the Brown at 4:44 AM on September 20, 2015 [4 favorites]
Response by poster: This is a home condo building mailbox Little paper slip on locked mailbox usually says the unit owner's name, i.e. "John Smith" or "New Moon, Inc."
This address is similar to:
p-k 76-4587
posted by Tullyogallaghan at 9:42 AM on September 20, 2015
This address is similar to:
p-k 76-4587
posted by Tullyogallaghan at 9:42 AM on September 20, 2015
This thread is closed to new comments.
Or maybe "he" is an android and that's his model or serial number?
posted by contraption at 6:39 PM on September 19, 2015 [9 favorites]