2023-12-23 (originally posted to Mastodon on 2023-12-22)

Fun shift at the postal depot last night

Fun shift at the postal depot last night.

Not as many packages now, this close to Christmas, so a few of us were doing 'manual sort' - slotting lettermail into the pigeonholes that represent individual delivery routes in a city.

Ok let me just say: it was an absolute JOY seeing all the handwritten greeting card envelopes, from the wonky but determined lettering of the 6-year-old given a Very Important Task, to the shaky but still handsome cursive of someone that was named Edith? or Pearl?

I saw rows of precise silver all-caps on purple paper, and a dramatic, swooshy ballpoint-on-white effort that misspelled the destination's street name with a boundless confidence.

Managed to figure out one where the sender had clearly only (mis)heard the address spoken aloud, and a couple more where the sender didn't anticipate that their scrawls would need interpreting by a real life human being at some point in between the mailboxes at either end of the journey.

And yeah we're gonna do our best to figure out the letter that only had a surname and town too, don't worry.

Happy holidays from the night shift at Canada Post!

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