Sooo on (hopefully) safer ground: what are some niche but useful to the general public things you've learnt? Specifically through jobs, but all sources are welcome really.
For instance, I work for the Royal Mail. Specifically in the UK, but I assume it works similarly in a lot of similar places, (we pre-sort for Australia, NZ, US and Canada so I assume those places at least). Your mail is taken from the post box, put on a conveyer belt to be put flat and a photo taken of both sides. A computer tries to read the address from the photo and if it struggles it sends it to people like me for help.
So, some rather niche but useful tips for getting your mail to arrive quickly and in the right place, especially at this time of year:
- Metallic gel pens, especially silver, when writing the address is so hard for the computer and us to read on the photos. It tends to have to be kicked out the system and to be manually sorted.
- Red or silver envelopes. Red turns up very dark on the photos making addresses near impossible to read I have seen people write on silver envelop in silver. It's pretty awful.
- Calligraphy/loopy writing. It looks nice, but it's hard to read. We have 10 seconds to read your address before it starts backing up the system.
- We have to put what you put on the envelope. We're not allowed to correct you if you're wrong. This is a particular issue for Santa letters and it breaks my heart, but we are legally not allowed to change wrong addresses to Santa. The official address for Santa's workshop in the UK is XM4 5HQ (get the pun?) but many people think they can make one up. XM5 is common, even shops sell pre addressed envelopes with wrong addresses. You can't. We legally have to boot it out, while if you just put to Santa, we can direct it to the right place so Santa's elves can write back.
- Also, for the record, Canada wins the Santa address race for having H0H0H0.
So, what weird and niche but useful things have you learnt over the years? Share your stories about weird things you've learnt that others might want to know to help them along.