A redirection is a paid order to send one address's mail to another, and it has a start date, an end date and a payment, and the system will not accept one without all three. There is one on our books with a start date in 1988 and no end date, from an address that has been a gap between two houses since a fire that year, to the same address, and the mail for it is redirected every day, to itself, and delivered.
I am the redirections clerk, which means every order in the district passes through me.
How a redirection works.
The customer fills in the form, pays for three, six or twelve months, and the order goes on the system with the old address, the new address and the dates. The machine reads the old address off each item and gates it to the new. When the end date passes the order lapses and the mail goes back to the old address, and the system will not take an order with no end date, because the payment sets it.
There is an order on the system with a start date in 1988 and no end date.
The old address is a house number on a street in the town. The new address is the same house number on the same street.
The house is not there. It burned in 1988, in a fire that is in the county's records, and the plot has been a gap between its neighbours since, with a fence across the front and a bench behind it that the council put in.
The order redirects the house's mail to the house. Every item addressed there is read, matched to the order, gated to the redirection bay, relabelled with the same address, and delivered.
To a gap. By a postman who walks that street and who, when I asked, said he puts it through the door.
What has been checked.
The order. It cannot be deleted. The system refuses on the grounds that the order has no end date, which is the state it refuses to create and will not remove. Head office have been sent it, and they replied that there was no such order, and sent me a screenshot of their system, which does not show it, and I sent them a screenshot of mine, which does, and the matter is with somebody.
The payment. There is a payment reference. It is a cheque number, from a bank that was merged away in the nineties, for the sum a twelve month redirection cost in 1988.
The mail. There is mail. A bill or two a month, a card at Christmas, from senders who have that address for that name, and who, when I have written to them under the returned mail procedure, have written back to say that their records are correct and that the person lives there.
The postman.
He is not a fanciful man and he has walked that street for eleven years. He says the house is there. He says it is a semi with a green door and a porch, between the two houses that I can see from the bench, and that he puts the mail through the letterbox in the green door and that there is a mat behind it, and that he has never seen anybody, and that the garden is kept.
I have stood on that pavement with him. He pointed at the gap and described the porch.
What is done about it.
The order runs. The mail is delivered. The system counts it as a delivered redirection and the statistics are right, and the fire is thirty six years ago, and the neighbours have never once complained of post through the wrong door, which they would, if it were going through theirs.
What I do.
I process redirections.
The one thing I have changed is that I have stopped sending the returned mail letters to the senders, because of one reply.
It came from a company that sends a statement to the house every quarter, and it said that their records were correct, and that the account holder had been in touch to confirm the address the previous month, by telephone, and that she had asked them to note that the redirection would be ending soon, and that they should update their records to the new address, which she gave, and which the company had passed to me as a courtesy, and which was mine.