I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms . He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on the PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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The Romance of Royal Mail I must say, I love the UK post code system. I mean a UK address looks like this: John Smith 5 Middlewhatsis Road (or, 'The Whatsis', since names count as addresses) Somevillage SOMESHIRE XX01 2AB And that last line is the post code. But you know what? Mail would probably got there if you addressed it like this: John Smith 5 (or 'The Whatsis') XX01 2AB because the post code itself is that precise. That's brilliant. Can you imagine the success rate if you addressed stuff in the US like this: John Smith 5 10021 Not good, I suspect. And I intend no slur on the US Postal Service! They do a fine job. It's just that a zip code is so much less granular than a post code. Take using satnav (or gps): if I pop in the post code, odds are pretty good the satnav will get me within spitting distance of my destination; if I pop in nothing but a zip code, well ... try it sometime. Which means that when there is a failure, it's that much more distressing. Ironically, the most epic fail of my, admittedly limited, UK satnav experience was trying to find a post office. This is part of the continuing saga of the mailbox. Allow me to elucidate. As mentioned previously, none of the keys I have will open my mailbox, so I implemented the workaround illustrated in the photo. And it worked a treat. I fished most of the things out of the mailbox with the aid of knife and since they were all addressed to previous tenants, I thought I was probably OK. Then the Sky engineer arrived to set up our telly and DVR. In NYC, when the cable guy arrives, inevitably late after you've been waiting all day with rapidly mounting frustration and annoyance, he brings the box, the cabling and all that, and sets it up. Sky gave me a smaller arrival window, half a day rather than the whole day, and then kept sending me text messages to let me know an actual time, and estimated delays and so on. Not that I got the messages until after the fact, since I don't compulsively check my texts, but that's neither here nor there. So far, so good. (For dramatic effect, I will now shift to the present tense.) The setup is proceeding apace, and Neil (his name was Neil and he was very nice) is setting things up and asks if I have the card. What card, I ask? Apparently, Sky sends you a SIM card of some kind in the mail which pops into the DVR and controls the box to some degree. According to their records, it should have arrived. Right. I grab a convenient wire coat-hanger, and, because I am a tool-using monkey, turn it into a mail-from-mailbox extraction device. Because I am an effective tool-using monkey, this time all of the mail was extracted from the box, which was then resealed. Included in the haul were: many things for previous tenants, the Sky card, a notice from a delivery firm about a delivery which they had already redelivered and I had received, and a notice from the Royal Mail that I had a package waiting for pickup. Which brings us up to date. I'd ordered some things from Amazon, you see, and they got here before I did. No worries, though, I'd just pop down in the rental car and pick it up. Opening hours were listed there along with the address. I did some looking and while the exact address didn't pop up on the mapping program, the street and postcode did. So, I would go to that point, be within spitting distance, and there'd be a nice, big Royal Mail sign, right? I began without benefit of AEthel, my phone, since after all it was straight down the road. I drove farther than I thought it was, pulled over and fired up the satnav, and, sure enough, I had overshot. So, second try, this time with satnav assist. I followed the audible directions through parts of town I didn't know, and ultimately realized AEthel was driving me, quite literally, in a circle. So I pulled over in a car park to think. There were passers-by! I could ask one of them. So I did, and ran into my first, real, solid Northern accent. I'll guess it was specifically Yorkshire, but my ear isn't that good yet. I was able to understand him after a moment's adjustment, and learned that my destination was 'down past pub.' I thanked him and moved on. The rest is anticlimactic. Armed with this local knowledge, I found my turn and after a bit more wandering found the pickup window and returned home with my prize - a six-gang, universal adapter, power strip. It doesn't convert voltage, but it takes (among others) both UK and US plugs, and since most of the electronics' power supplies handle both voltages, I'm good to go. This episode brought to you by the verb 'to pop,' or in Latin, 'popo, -are, popi, popatum.' Luddite'sLog, 15 September 2013 © 2013 Jeff Berry

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