Postcard Design Flaw

What a crazy day it has been. This morning I found out I got a raise over two weeks ago, so all this time I have been working for more money. That was a happy surprise! Then a bunch of postcards I sent out got returned to us, but they didn’t have any message on them like “insufficient postage” or “return to sender,” so I contacted the mailroom manager, who asked me to send a scan of the postcard front and back to him. This is what happened: it was a design flaw! Last year when the grad students designed this postcard (for a department Christmas party), they put the address of the party very high on the postcard, so when the automatic address machines at the post office looked for an address, starting from the bottom, the lowest one they found was the handwritten one on the back of the postcard, where we actually wanted it to go. This year the grad students designed the postcard with the address of the party in the lower part of the front of the card, as part of the design, but the automatic address machine didn’t know that was part of the design – it just found the lowest address on the postcard (it didn’t care which side it was on) and sent it to that address. So, in effect, we mailed a bunch of these postcards to ourselves because the party will be in our department. It’s too late to do anything about it now – the party is tonight – but had I known, I could have forewarned the grad students when they copied me on an email with the final design. Now I know for the future. And now you, my readers, also know about this hidden danger. The mailroom manager said we are not the only ones – one department got thousands of postcards mailed back to them for the same reason! If he sees this design flaw, he will contact us before mailing the postcards, but he was not in the mailroom the day ours got mailed. The biggest mystery is why only a fourth of these postcards came back. Will more trickle in? Did the grad student who handwrote the addresses write most of them lower on the postcard than the address in the design on the front? Or are they just lost in the mail?

Famous Hat