Man desperate to send letter draws map because he doesn’t have the address – amazingly it gets delivered! - February 5, 2020 at 08:07AM

What are the chances of a letter being delivered if you draw a simple map of where the intended recipient lives, rather than their full postal address? Now imagine what the chances would be in a remote part of the Scandinavian island of Iceland. Well, despite there seeming to be very little chance of success, one tourist to Iceland decided to take a risk, and incredibly, his letter was delivered. As you can see from the picture we have included with this post, the map was very basic and would have been a great challenge, were it not for a little bit of extra information he included. On the envelope, the tourist was able to provide the name of the nearest town in Iceland, Búðardalur, and where their name should have been, he put “A horse farm with an Icelandic/Danish couple and three kids and a lot of sheep!”. However, the clinching clue was a little comment he put next to the map: “The Danish woman works in a supermarket in Búðardalur.” It turns out there is only one supermarket in Búðardalur and only one Danish woman who worked there! How fortunate was that?!

Image credits: Jidoen

The other fortunate thing is that the “town” only has a population of 266 inhabitants, so while it may have taken a little time, it was probably destined to reach the recipients even without the map and just the description of who they were. Of course, Iceland is not the only country where people don’t correctly address envelopes. In the UK, they have a specialist department in their postal service which deals with over 300 million poorly addressed envelopes every year, where they do their best to try and establish who the recipients are meant to be. Over 300 people work in that department too! Have you got any tales of strange encounters with your postal system like a letter delivered a few years after it was posted? Let us know in the comments below.

Image credits: jaari