B.G. Willers

A little experiment with the Postal Service

At work the other day, Jenn was trying to tell me that you could mail a letter without putting the city or state on there, just the zip code. I wasn’t so sure. I remember a couple times my grandma would mail me cards when I was young to just my name with the city and state. No zip code. And it got there! Of course Ingalls is quite a small little berg.

So we devised two experiments.

1) We addressed a letter normally, but instead of putting the City and State on there, we just put the zip code on. She threw a stamp on it and we threw it in the mail in a public drop box. We’ll see if it ever arrives.

2) This experiment I found a bit more intriguing. Say you want to mail a letter, but you don’t have a stamp. Well, what if you put the person you want to send TO in the RETURN address location.? Without a stamp, would the letter not be returned to the supposed sender? Which in this case is actually the intended destination?

So we just swapped the return address, and the to addresses, and dumped it into a public mailbox with no stamp. We’ll see if that goes anywhere as well.

I’m pretty sure there is some kind of law against this, so I wouldn’t try it on a regular basis. But I’m curious to see if the letters end up where we want them to. Updates to follow!