h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Recently, I wanted to send off some parcels, the Post Office counter staff reminded me that I should put a return address on the items. All she wanted of my details was the house number and the postcode, no mention of a street or town name at all. Does this have something to do with the sorting process, in that the only person who needs the street name is a delivery person? I imagine that a Postman, after years of experience, probably doesn't need the street any more.

I'd agree about the postmen - a friend of mine as a postman, and he knew all the area postcodes, although he didn't mention streets.

If they had to return anything, they'd probably check up the exact address and put it in the right place in their bag.

from my limited knowledge on it, (gathered from a trip to a sorting office nearly 20 years ago), the sorting machines work by using small machine readable dots that are printed onto the envelopes or packages.

When I went to the sorting office, a team of people used to sit there and read off the postcodes and type them into the machine which printed out the dots.

Now most of this is done by optical character recognition which reads the postcodes and turns them into dots, then the sorting system sorts them to where they need to go.

In theory, the process is totally automated until the postman picks up the batch of letters for his walk, and he sorts them into house order.