post waste
There is one thing I could never grasp about the Irish postal service.
Someone had obviously gone to the trouble of dividing the city of Dublin up into areas, assigning numbers to them all to make the delivering of the post that much easier.
Of course, I’m totally on board with that, why shouldn’t I be?
But take a look at what they did a little more closely.
In their infinite wisdom, they decided to put the odd numbers on the northside and the even numbers on the southside. That seems very clever at first, for if you’re not immediately sure exactly where a number is, you should at least have an idea which side of the Liffey you were talking about.
Sadly, the wisdom ends there. For some reason which completely escapes me, they chose to only give numbers to the greater Dublin city area, which meant that places that were still in the county of Dublin both north AND south but not in the required zone were referred to as “County Dublin”.
Why go to the bother of designing a system to make places easier to find only to make addresses both Balbriggan to the north and Blackrock to the south appear to be in the same area?
With all this in mind, I can’t wait to see what new national postcode system the government plan to unveil, if indeed they plan to unveil one at all. It was meant to come on stream in January 2008 until Minister Eamon Ryan decided it was best to put it on hold.
Of course, I’m not exactly dripping with experience when it comes to political or postal matters, but how hard can it be to come up with postcodes for a country of just over 4 million people?
If it were down to me, I’d simply tack on numbers to the county abbreviations already used for car registrations. Perhaps that would be too easy?
Maybe An Post have so little to do what with us all emailing each other and everything that they want to make this task seem more difficult than it actually is.
Someone had obviously gone to the trouble of dividing the city of Dublin up into areas, assigning numbers to them all to make the delivering of the post that much easier.
Of course, I’m totally on board with that, why shouldn’t I be?
But take a look at what they did a little more closely.
In their infinite wisdom, they decided to put the odd numbers on the northside and the even numbers on the southside. That seems very clever at first, for if you’re not immediately sure exactly where a number is, you should at least have an idea which side of the Liffey you were talking about.
Sadly, the wisdom ends there. For some reason which completely escapes me, they chose to only give numbers to the greater Dublin city area, which meant that places that were still in the county of Dublin both north AND south but not in the required zone were referred to as “County Dublin”.
Why go to the bother of designing a system to make places easier to find only to make addresses both Balbriggan to the north and Blackrock to the south appear to be in the same area?
With all this in mind, I can’t wait to see what new national postcode system the government plan to unveil, if indeed they plan to unveil one at all. It was meant to come on stream in January 2008 until Minister Eamon Ryan decided it was best to put it on hold.
Of course, I’m not exactly dripping with experience when it comes to political or postal matters, but how hard can it be to come up with postcodes for a country of just over 4 million people?
If it were down to me, I’d simply tack on numbers to the county abbreviations already used for car registrations. Perhaps that would be too easy?
Maybe An Post have so little to do what with us all emailing each other and everything that they want to make this task seem more difficult than it actually is.
5 comment/s so far:
I had not seen that news about Ryan postponing the roll out. I was involved in this earlier consultation process through a job I used to do. An Post were never in favour of a postcode system from the off because it does not make their job any easier and in fact put as many obstacles as possible in the way of the process for one simple reason: it allowed their competitors like DHL and direct market postage people to get a foothold in their key market.
And another thing: why not just use a system that has been in place for hundreds of years and most people outside urban areas know implicitly - townlands.
Thanks for stopping by, 73.
When you write: "it allowed their competitors like DHL and direct market postage people to get a foothold in their key market", I read : "people got their stuff quicker".
The service is there for the people, not vice versa. The introduction of competition for our extortionate semi-state bodies has been way too slow, and Ryan's postponement only makes it slower.
Well, I can't seem to relate to this post much seeings how I don't live in Ireland... But I am glad to not have to read about Lost! :-) I tried a few times to get hooked into it but couldn't manage.
OK JL, I hear you. I am not saying that An Post are right to oppose it and from their point of view it does not make any sense but I would not defend private competitors either. As I said, we have a unique address ciode system for the last three hundred or so years: townlands.
shel : yeah, sorry about all the Lost stuff, there really is no grey area when it comes to the show, but I promise to stay away from the subject for a good while
73 : and I, too, take your point about townlands, and should anyone else want a look at what you're talking about, they can go here for excel spreadsheets listing all the different districts. All of us here in F13904 thank you for the suggestion.
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