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!

Haha I don't live there anymore so it's not my problem! I'll mention it to them next time I'm there (if I'm ever allowed into the country again). On the positive side they do have a big area for parking once you've identified the property - I've seen some enormous vehicles in there.

I took up a second job delivering takeaway so I can absolutely relate! Walking up the street to find a house number then trying to work out if it's odds and evens or another system and counting back. Also if you are expecting a delivery please answer your phone! I've sometimes had to call for help with finding people and they just don't answer.
I had one the other day for a delivery depot for AO but they hadn't told me that. If they had I'd have found them immediately. Instead they gave me a house number which is displayed nowhere.

[quote Yesitsbess]**@AvocadosBeforeMortgages* Yes, this is an actual picture of Hell. We have not one, but five of these on our patch. They all have stupid road names that aren't phonetic when phone orders are taken. Some of them even have the same road names as other roads in the same village*

Faints[/quote]
I wish it was only 5 (I cover an entire city). It's not helped by many of the road names being in Welsh.

I don't speak Welsh - I grew up 5 miles over the border and my school was about as likely to teach Klingon as it was Welsh. Mind you, even my Welsh educated friends can't string a sentence together in Welsh. "Can you spell that out please?" is just the default option.

I'm sure there's plenty of people who think delivery drivers are slightly thick. I'm not - I've got a 2:1 from a Russell Group university - I just had the misfortune to have been running an events business in the middle of a pandemic and had to do deliveries to stop the business going to the wall.

people with GIANT NUMBERS IN LIGHTS on their houses AND BINS

How would one actually install giant numbers in lights on the bin? That seems like overkill...

I live in a street of semis, all in number order, well lit street etc. I have my house number in large font on my wheelie bins, on the door and usually put in the notes section, “house with small caravan in the drive” (I’m the only house on the street with a caravan on the drive). Yodel still managed to wrongly deliver a parcel 15 doors away the other week...

Oh god, I’d forgotten about my old house.
Never used the front door - as the landlady had grown loads of plants over it.
She refused to let me put our house name on the front gate/anywhere visible from the road.
It was tucked away down a tiny little alleyway, only house for miles.
I did persuade her to let me put an outside light up, that she insisted had to be energy saving bulbs that wouldn’t light up an idea.
To top it all off? We lived in a tiny village, where ALL the houses had stupid names:
Larksmeade
Larksmeadow
Larksmeade house
Larksmeadow house
Larksmeade Farm
Larksmeadow Farm
Larksmeade Farm Barns
Larksmeadow Farm Barns
Old Larksmeade
Old Larksmeadow
And the pub was called “Larksmeade Arms”
It drove me CRAZY, until I managed to get ahold of the actual deeds for the property and found out they all had NUMBERS, so I stuck reflective numbers on our wheelie bin and kept it out the front, and only ordered things to the number, not the name!

@OublietteBravo I am 100% inventing light up bin signs now.

You're welcome.

I do really really love the reflective bin stickers. Not least because they remind me of the bike safety stickers we used to get at school in the 80's. I loved the smell.

i only have one number visible, populated area small close but even in broad daylight couriers have knocked next door even though they have their number on aswell

dont know what else to do

And also blocks of flats that don't tell you in large letters what numbers are in that block. So you have to walk to the keypad for each block and look at the numbers most of which have faded over time.

@ToffeePennie I am giggling so much right now. Larksbastards, all of them!

I do remember going on holiday couple of years ago to a rental theyd only named their house the same as one up the road which we didnt know of course

the owners of the other house despaired at all the people that turned up looking for their rental-i mean why would you do that

@AvocadosBeforeMortgages my dh is welsh i still dont understand the names and signs god knows what its like to deliver there when youre not used to it

@Mylittlesandwich YES. THIS. And those Victorian house ones that have eight flats in now but nobody has bothered to number the doorbells. Is the ground floor number one or flat 8? Am I about to wake someone's Nan up and wave a delicious snack at her when it was actually for the stoner boy upstairs?

Answers on a light up bin/postcard please.

@AvocadosBeforeMortgages Welsh street names would be a circle of Hell too far for me. I would literally die trying to deliver there.

I live in a Victorian mid-terrace house in the middle of a street. Inexplicably, Google maps had our house labelled as being on the road our street is off so delivery drivers kept dropping stuff there instead of our house until DP contacted Google to change it! Totally bizarre given they had our NDNs in the right place

Sites that use your postcode to autofill your address aren't always as helpful as they think they are either...

I lived in Edinburgh in a tenement flat. It would always come up as 47/5 Area Street on sites that filled it in for you, but when you actually got to number 47, the door buzzers (and doors inside) were labelled 1f1, 1f2 etc referring to the floor and flat number.

When I had the choice to write it myself I'd always put 47/3f1 Area Street. (Although then if you had to show three bills to prove your address you had to choose carefully!)

I've also been phoned by annoyed delivery drivers because I've lived on two roads that have at some point been split/blocked in the middle, so you have to enter at one end to go to numbers 1-50 and at the other end for 51-100. Sometimes I just used to walk to the middle and meet them there!

I used to live in a flat in a listed converted church. For some reason people refused to believe that “deliver to the church” was a real direction. Once when someone pointed it out to a visitor they said “no, it can’t be that, she’s not a nun”.

I live on an estate numbered by ceiling fan. We're number 26, next door we have 28 on one side, 59 on the other side which is technically the end of a different street but blends seamlessly into ours and only has a street sign at the opposite end of it. If you were looking for 27 you'd assume it would be nearby, maybe opposite our house, but no - you need to go 300 yards down the road, turn left into what looks like a totally separate street, and you'll find it down there.
Off to buy some big numbers to stick on my garage now as I've just realised our hedge obscures our house sign from the road.

House number on big plaque and put instructions on order. 9/10 delivery drivers go to my next door neighbour. One actually had a go at me for not being clear....

My DPs road is perfectly normally numbered (odds on one side, evens the other), but it's quite bendy and has several cul-de-sacs off the sides. It starts off with 1 and 2 opposite, and is like that down to about 9 and 10, when the curves and road openings start to mean you have fewer houses at one end than the other. It catches back up by the time you reach the other end, but at one point you have 34 opposite 49. You get a lot of people driving very slowly and peering out!

@ViolaValentina You live somewhere that sounds very like the delivery that drove me to tears!

Love you for your big number purchasing. I consider this thread my gift to delivery drivers (and big number retailers).

One of my house buying criteria was to live somewhere easy for delivery drivers! We used to live in a flat where the back of the building was one road, but to get to the front access you had to turn down a different road and then turn again. For some reason to do with planning permission the address was the road the building backed onto. To make matters worse there were a number of buildings in the development each with flats 1-10 all had different names, but the developer hadn’t put signs up for the names! There were never enough characters in the instruction box to explain it. In the end we had parcels sent to a very understanding local friend.

New house, “normal” residential through road, odds one side, evens the other. Light shining directly above house number easily visible from the road, huge dropped kerb for drivers to pull up outside. It makes me very happy after years of lost parcels and cold takeaways.

You have my sympathy @Yesitsbess as I live in a new house and the developers have put the street names in very weird places eg Not facing you as you are driving towards the street and then quite a way into the street to avoid spoiling a house frontage . The numbers on the doors are high up and because of movement sensitive external lights , the lights only come on when someone is very near the door . It's a nightmare for grocery deliveries at night .

It also depends though on the Sat Nav system being used . So many people seem to think we are in a field near to the next big town instead of in our village . Tesco and Waitrose are spot on with their systems . Sainsbury sat nav is a nightmare - they can never find us .

You'd loathe my inlaws - their road is all house names, not number, and they don't have the name displayed because...... they have front garden decor according to the name - think along the lines of 'cherry Blossom cottage ' with aforementioned cherry tree in the garden or 'fountain way' with a small fountain in the front. So you'd need to be capable of solving cryptic crosswords or walk the length of their street to figure out which house it is!