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

So do those distinctive "US mail" boxes actually belong to the postal service? That is weird.

What Teaswill is describing is just a hole in the front door. What goes through there lands on your hall rug, which definitely is NOT the property of the Royal Mail.

Here in Germany, too, we have to put a letter box at the bottom of the drive. It is such a hassle: first you have to find the key, then find your shoes and trudge down to the garden gate whatever the weather, then wrestle the post out of the box (once you have got the blooming lock open) and carry all the post back (through the rain, if applicable), sort out the junk mail and advertising and dispose of it, put any envelopes which have been wrongly delivered by the door, find a pen and write "not known at this address" or similar on it; this will go to the proper addressee, if nearby, or otherwise to the next post box, then put any relevant and genuine post that may be left on the radiator to dry out.

Telephone books are stacked by the door of the local supermarkets and post offices and you can take as many as you need when you are out shopping.

I'm not sure that we get telephone books in the UK anymore.

I do appreciate dwellings with long driveways/hard to find doors having a mailbox by the front gate. In the UK they seem often to be silly size & shape - you couldn't get an A4 envelope in unfolded. I've also seen a few 'newspaper' boxes, designed for a rolled up paper, whereas ours come simply folded in half.

Are those US mailboxes the ones with a flag to show they have mail inside? What a fafff to have to go & look just in case.

Yep, the ones with the narrow slit and the tiny cage on the door to stop the from shredding the post that you were nevertheless supposed to fit umpteen broadsheets into somehow were tricky...

I miss my paper round....

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US home mail boxes are the property of the homeowner. I didn't know if they still have the restrictions that they had in the '80s so I just checked. Even though we buy our mail boxes from hardware stores and the like, the USPS still considers them their property. So nothing that doesn't have sufficient postage and has been processed by the postal service is allowed to go into a mail box. And nothing can be attached to a mail collection box. Mail slots in doors are the exception. They obviously do belong solely to the homeowner so anyone can place a flyer or other things through a mail slot.


Mail theft is a serious problem in my little S-town so several years ago I went to a chain hardware store and purchased a large lockable mail box (for around $150). It has a door much like the ones in the collection boxes that opens but blocks access into the box below and then dumps the mail and small packages into the box as it's closed. A key is required to access the contents.


And yes, red flags are attached that the owner raises when there is outgoing mail to be collected and the postal carrier lowers after retrieving the outgoing mail and delivering incoming mail. So unless you raised the flag earlier and see it's down you have to open the mail box to see if any new mail has arrived.

Sorry for the contradicting statements regarding mail box ownership. I don't fully understand why the USPS considers them their property even though they're purchased from third party retailers.

Heck, some people build their own, decorative, mail boxes. I know they have to meet certain criteria but still, whatsupwiththat?

In Germany, of course, the boxes that people have attached to their gateposts hav to mean certain size stipulations. They also all have a tube underneath to take a newspaper and/or the enormous wads of supermarket and furniture store flyers that get delivered all together once a week along with a local freebie paper.

PH: Things that are unnecessarily 'handed'.

I like doing calligraphy, and find the felt tip pens the easiest to use. My favourite brand seems to have been discontinued, so I bought a different brand today. When I opened it, I found that this brand has "an ergonomic comfort grip for ease of use" (if you're right-handed...)

Luckily I can still use the pens but, being left-handed, I find it is a non-ergonomic discomfort grip that makes an impressive dent in my finger...

I have a not entirely dissimilar annoyance in that my favourite drawing pen is a Pentel Superb BK101 as the tip gives a lovely, thin 0.25mm line and the pen is a nice thickness with excellent grip - but they've stopped making. The pen body takes the same ink as found in the thin BK77 that they're still making, so I used to buy BK77s, take the ink out the middle and put them in the BK101 bodies - which worked perfectly, until about 5 years ago when they sealed the end of the BK77s so you can't take the ink out the middle.

I had stocked up on BK77s expecting to be able to transplant the ink, but have since discovered that some places sell the refills so when I run out I'll order some of those.

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PH: Communal changing areas - such as found in public swimming pools.

I went to a swimming pool on Saturday which had changing rooms consisting of a large open room with a bench and pegs around the outside and another tiled open room with 6 shower taps next to each other and nothing between them, and about a dozen 10-year-olds getting changed for a swim class. Am I the only one who thinks that it is very awkward trying to have a shower and get changed under those circumstances?
I don't think anyone I know has ever really liked open communal changing rooms. It was bad enough having to endure at school umpteen years ago, when after you'd got changed and hung clothes up on the peg the bullies liked to take everyone's clothes and bags and chuck them in the shower area. These days people are far more aware of things like body anxiety etc, so why not have cubicles to allow privacy?
I accept that those in a sport team often consider locker rooms to be an exclusive and positively intimate area which helps build teamwork etc, which is fine – so in changing rooms exclusively intended for team sport that's fine. But everywhere else just let us have individual or family-size cubicles, and proper lockers. Not just pegs around the outside of an open room and an open shower area beneath a set of taps.

(Funnily enough, when I got home I had a letter inviting me to a 3-hour safeguarding course in order to be allowed to spend time with my own children at a club held in the local church hall.)

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Not only awkward, but total lack of security for people & their property.
A very long time since I have visited a swimming pool, but should at least be an option of cubicles & lockers. Gyms/leisure centres seem pretty similar, although the showers are usually separate cubicles which could allow for some privacy changing.

Perhaps things are better now, but there's also a lack of hygiene in terms of washing before entering the pool.

Of course, there are countries where it is the norm eg Japanese onsen (male/female segregated) & no-one bats an eyelid.

Old Victorian Swimming baths were segregated and had individual changing cubicles...

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/victoria-baths

Since my youngest recently passed his final swimming exam, I am happy to say that I will not be going to that swimming pool ever again (if remotely possible).

They have a mix of small and family size cubicles, lockers and four big changing rooms of the bench and hooks persuasion. Those were divided into "Men 1"/"Men 2"/"Mixed"/"Women". Only "Women" is strictly segregated (kid and parent must be female), whereas for both "Men" rooms, this is generally only held to count for the gender of the kid that is changing, not the accompanying parent. (Apparently, women staring at boys is always OK)

I'm sure this is a common petty hate, and I even think it has its own forum or article around here somewhere, but this week's for me is a pernicious bit of business speak, or corporate jargon. You know the drivel, like "paradigm shift" or "action item" or "deliverables".

I've been getting emails this week from someone high enough above me I can absolutely ignore all their emails. (Or I'm far enough below her.) The ones like this are contract wide and are expected to be ignored by most. These are basically advertising a series of presentations from personnel who attended a regional conference sharing what they learned there. The titles of these emails read...


IDEATION INFUSION




They're subtitled "knowledge sharing" which is annoying enough, but "ideation infusion"!? off!

Googling "ideation infusion" leads to all kinds of suicide related links. That is probably not the message your Personnel department is trying to convey... (I hope)

Related PH: Management e-mails IN GODSPEAK FULL CAPS ALL THE WAY. It reads like you are being screamed at.

PH: Telephone lines that are advertised as open 8am-8pm and you ring at 7pm and hear the recorded message that the line is currently closed

Hearing you are the third/second/first in line for an hour and then being cut off due to that closing time.

Mr T's PH is the ones that say 'your call is important to us'. If it's that important, get enough staff to answer the phones.

There's a number I call frequently (pharmacy/druggist) that says that my call is important to them. They say it about every 25 seconds. When they aren't saying that, they're playing the same clip of Muzak to me, a brief segment of a tune on piano, just the first part of the intro to the piece, maybe three and a half stanzas, then "YOUR CALL IS IMPORTANT. ALL OUR REPRESENTATIVES ARE EITHER BUSY OR ON ANOTHER LINE. YOUR CALL WILL BE ANSWERED IN THE ORDER IT WAS A RECEIVED. PLEASE STAY ON THE LINE AND YOUR CALL WILL BE ANSWERED SHORTLY."

We are lucky here then. Usually the muzak continues between the "stay on the line or visit our website" messages. Some even have two tunes that alternate (but if you find out about that, you are usually in for a long wait).

Scientists calling Mars the red planet when in fact it is not one colour but several colours. It always looked like a combination between a rusty brown and a rusty orange with hints of pink.