To ask you...no, to BEG you...

[Yesitsbess]

Put your house numbers on your house people!

I lost my hospitality job during the lockdown and, as many people have had to, took up a delivery job to make ends meet. I have learned that delivery drivers are grumpy for a reason! Those reasons are numerous.

If you want to help us out for reasons that include: our safety, our being able to park safely, our being able to make the insane time targets we are set by our companies, our not wasting fuel looking for you (both environmentally and efficiency-wise) and you just getting your food/parcels/taxis on-time then please have a look at the following:

1. God tier - people with GIANT NUMBERS IN LIGHTS on their houses AND BINS ( we love you, especially if we deliver after dark) even if we're not delivering to your house, we use you as navigation because Googlemaps is shite.

1. Mid-tier - people who live somewhere hard-to-find but include directions on their order. Your street has 'odds and evens'. You have your number on your door in a colour that is discernible in the dark.

1. Poo-tier - people who live on a New build estate where the developer assigned house numbers by THROWING A CALCULATOR AT A CEILING FAN, and yet they think Google maps will see us right. It will not and we hate you.

1. Hell Tier - people who live on a main road, with long drives spanning off said main road, with NO indication of what house number/name they are at he end of their drive...

1. Seventh circle of Hell tier - you live very rurally and don't provide directions. Or in a very difficult to access place, or you have insane building works on the path, your dog is horrible (please stop your dogs humping and/or biting us - we're on minimum wage, we don't care if he "never does this usually!")

Anyway, if you've read this and think "We're golden!" on this issue, drive around your neighbouring roads at night and try to pick a random number to find - it's a fun game and might help you see what we see?

PUT NUMBERS ON YOUR HOUSES PEOPLE!

DH has just reminded me of his aged aunt who lives in a hamlet of about 30 properties (mostly farms). Noone uses the address. They just pout the name of the person and the name of the hamlet.

So it would be

Aunt Flo
LargeHamlet
Sussex.

I once had our (notoriously unpleasant and officious post mistress) simp,y refuse to take my Christmas parcel for Aunt Flo because she refused to believe that was the actual address. (It was. It might be completely mad but it was the address).

(Same notoriously unpleasant and officious post mistress told me it was 'illegal' for me not to change my bank card to my married name after marriage and informed me she would be reporting me to the police, but that is another thread.).

@NotSeenBulling I love you and your smiley cone!

I'm not able to reply to everyone but those of you who have taken this as food for thought, suggested or made improvements, or have just made me belly laugh with your weird street numbering stories, thankyou all so much.

And what3words or updating Google maps is fabulous and very much appreciated, but a number or plaque or a clear delivery instruction (even if it's just the colour of the car parked on your drive or the fact that your house in under streetlamp number 3 on the left - this was an actual instruction I had!) please remember that none of that tech is very useful in a no-signal area or if your device dies a house number or plaque for a name is still God tier for me

We also don't want to be staring at devices when we should be concentrating on the road.

Mind you.
I am number (I'll changeth eactual number here) 42. Next to my house there is an empty space whichis the entrance to a field. (suburbia, so not rural) the empty space is number 44 and the next house is number 46.

The number of times I have had post for number 44 delivered. One organisation sent something every month. Our regular postie didn't deliver it, but others did. To us at no. 42.
When we rang the organisation they couldn't change it, because it wasn't our address. And it was for something like sat TV which doesn't exist in a field
After a long phone call where we got put further and further up the ranks, someone finally went - hold on, are you saying that that address is A FIELD????? Er -yes.
OH right, we'll delete it!

I’m almost god tier but my numbers aren’t lit up.

Has anyone mentioned WhatThreeWords LINK HERE. It has given every three square metres on the planet (I think?) a three word reference. It’s really useful for pinpointing exact locations. Get Fresh use it.

@gallileofigaro Deliveries to the pub? Works for me Also I deliver food so I reckon I could get my Ford Rollerskate up your path.

Oh bugger.....I accidentally missed the last pages 😂😂. Oh well,another vote for WhatThreeWords

WhatThreeWords DOES work offline

@steppemum

Oh my goodness. My parents used to live in a village. There were no road names, as the whole village was one street. Execpt of course it wasn't, little off shoots with 4 houses down it.

There were no numbers in the vilalge at all except for 5 houses in a row at the beginning. All the rest were names, and the names went something like this:

The Manor
The Old Manor
Manor Farm
Manor Farm Barn
The Barn
The Old Barn
The Old Manor Barn
Manor Farmhouse
The Farm
The Farm Barn.

and no, I am not exaggerating.

no streetlights, and lots of driveways, but most houses did have the name clearly on the gate

I can do one better than that. My folks live in a village with no road name as there is just one road. All the houses have names. Their house is the same name as one of the names listed above. But, there are also 3 other houses in the village with the same name! They are semi detached with one of the houses with the same name. The other houses are a pair of victorian houses again both called the same name. All 4 have the same postcode. With the advent of the internet and online shopping they discovered that if you put the postcode in you get the option for number 1, 2, 3, or 4 House Name. So they had to decide between them which one was what number as none of the other houses in the village had numbers.

@StellaDendrite not if my phone is dead but I take your point. Would still prefer to have my full attention on the road though

My husband is a delivery driver and often complains about this - he often delivers to rural villages and gets frustrated when they don't have the house name or number visible! He ends up driving up and down the road using a head torch to try and see where he needs to go as they are usually places with no street lighting either!

Our house is a bit of a pain - new build estate but our road is actually a loop within the centre of the development. So it can be access two ways - which seems to cause confusion. However we do have numbers on our door and a plaque on the wall with our house number and street name.

My DH's suitcase got left behind on a European flight - I pickled him up at the airport to go on a weekend campervan trip, out of season. The airport called later to say his suitcase had been found and that they would deliver it - slight problem we said, we're up a mountain in a remote carpark (warning signs on the windy twisty 10 km access road!) and it's dark. No prob, said the guy, what's the registration number?
And sure enough , couple of hours later, knock on the door! (For a moment I thought os saying it was the wrong bag, just for a laugh...)

I’m number 3 on a new build estate, I always use a different post and provide directions so it’s easy to get here promise! Not sure everyone does that though

I see someone has mentioned What3Words. I have it on my phone as I'm often out with my dog in rural areas. It's free to install, accessible to everyone, easy to use and pretty infallible. It also has a navigation function.

Absolutely we should all be using our W3W location as an addition to our address. You can actually buy house name plates with your W3W address on them. I'm surprised delivery companies don't ask for it as a matter of course, and many emergency services are now using it routinely......

Just brilliant.

OP ... YANBU ...

Delivery driver here.

Throw a calculator at a ceiling fan

There is a street here and the numbers go 47, 48, 49, 50...55, 54, 53, 52, 51..56, 57, 58.

New build, they are all in a row from 1-74 apart from those backwards ones, makes no sense.

@whoopsnomore

My DH's suitcase got left behind on a European flight - I pickled him up at the airport to go on a weekend campervan trip, out of season. The airport called later to say his suitcase had been found and that they would deliver it - slight problem we said, we're up a mountain in a remote carpark (warning signs on the windy twisty 10 km access road!) and it's dark. No prob, said the guy, what's the registration number? And sure enough , couple of hours later, knock on the door! (For a moment I thought os saying it was the wrong bag, just for a laugh...)

That is actually awesome!

@PinkSpring Tell him I share his head torch woes, I am also a huge fan of picking my way through huge gardens with no obvious path in the pitch dark whilst hearing the ominous barking of dogs and really really hoping I've got the right house and am not about to get mauled/shot as an intruder!

House names are the worst. What is the value at all in having a house name. It could be anywhere. WHY?????

My house is easy to find but you turn into my road think "North Street" and it very quickly turns into another road without realising "West Street".

I live in 62 West Street but for some reason Sat Nav tells you that you are still in North Street so I always write on delivery notes "bungalow next door to school"

Once I called the AA to start my car on the drive and he phoned me and said "I'm here" I said I can't see you. Turned out he was in 62 North Street and hadn't followed the road round far enough, that's literally all it is.

@Pumpkinstace It's the only way I can make sense of how they number some of those estates, or they're drunk. "LET'S MAKE IT TEN, ELEVEN, ELEVENTY TWO...FORTY"

My other favourite is a road here where a large house was demolished and 6 built in the space, the road goes: 12, 12a, 12b, 12c, 12d, HOUSE WITH A NAME, 15, 16??? 12d is is also down a long dark path behind all the other twelves.

@whoopsnomore That. Is. Amazing. was the driver a mountain goat?

Favourite delivery story.

Parents live in a village, with a post box. One Christmas my mum posted a big pile of Christmas cards in the post box.
Postie collected them, and one didn't have an address on it, just a name on it. Some of them were for local addresses. So at the sorting office, he went and found the postie who would deliver to one of those addresses and explained the problem. Next morning that postie delivered the Christmas card and knocked on the door. Explained and asked who the card was from. They opened the card and said Jane Bloggs from XX village.

The postie goes back to the sorting office, tells the postie who collected the original post, and the next day he knocks on my mum's door with her unaddressed card, waits while she writes the address on it, and then takes it away and puts it in the post!

This would have been about 30 years ago mind you.

3. Poo-tier - people who live on a New build estate where the developer assigned house numbers by THROWING A CALCULATOR AT A CEILING FAN, and yet they think Google maps will see us right. It will not and we hate you.

OMG yes. There's a new build estate near me which - despite being laid out like a demented spiders web - all has the same road name (see the attached picture). Then the developers have numbered them in a way that suggests they were on drugs at the time. Number 21 is on the opposite side of the estate to numbers 20 and 22, and number 43 can't even be seen from the road.

Give me a row of Coronation Street Victorian terraces any day.

I have no idea if it would help but can you ask for the “What3words” location?

@MumsThewordw02 My nan had that kind of address in the old days:

Nan,
White house
Town name,
Near larger town
Sussex

1. God tier - people with GIANT NUMBERS IN LIGHTS on their houses AND BINS

I've missed the significance of bins, can anyone explain?