This site tracks my sending several incorrectly addressed letters to British Overseas Territories. This project follows in the tradition of the government efficiency test done in 2010-2011 by a group of Economists headed by Dr. Rafael La Porta and Dr. Andrei Shleifer. The test used mail handling as an index for corruption and productivity. My aim is a bit more prosaic – I am interested to see if a letter addressed to the nonexistent N. guem will return to sender, and if it does, how long did it take.
If you have opened one of the letters: Hello! Please write back.
Findings
The Territories & Bad Addresses
The Envelopes
The Onion Skin Letters
The Responses
where?
why?
I am always pleasantly surprised to find letters and postcards in my mailbox since, these days, the practice of sending a letter for correspondence is dwindling. That said, about a quarter of the mail in my mailbox is not destined to me – it is for the previous tenants of my house. This means the United States Postal Service is no longer forwarding their mail to their new address. To remedy this I write a note on the envelope and off it goes back from whence it came – sometimes with a hand with a pointing finger if I recognize the sender.
This writing of “return to sender” so many times got me thinking. If I send a letter to an address in a town that does not exist, the local post office sends the letter back with the stamp stating “No such address.” This has happened to me a few times. However, what would happen if I sent a letter to someplace overseas – to some far-flung speck of land in the middle of an ocean – would I receive the letter back? Dr. La Porta thinks more affluent countries with a civil service concerned with doing good are close to the one hundred percent mark for sending the letter back; do not bother with Russia – the return rate is zero.
Of all the places in the world, I decided to send these incorrectly addressed letters to, I rested on the British Overseas Territories. The question may arise, “why not the overseas French Departments, Svalbard, Heligoland, or even Guam?” Although the United Kingdom does not appear in the index of the most efficient returners, it is a signatory of the Universal Postal Union; a stipulation of the union is incorrectly addressed letters should be returned to the sender. Since the United Kingdom was noted for its excellent postal system at the height of the colonial era, I wanted to find out what it looked like in these days wherein Britain’s existing overseas territories are often an afterthought. Since the territories span the globe, why not? Maybe someone will open the letter and send back a very British “cheers.” Maybe.
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