Stand and Deliver

In order to get to the main point of today’s story, I first need to explain something to you: the Irish postal system. Or, rather, the postal code system. Or, to be even more precise, the 2 postal code systems, because it’s Ireland so we have 2 systems for something that every other country has 1 of. There are 2 postal code systems for Ireland: 1 for Dublin and 1 for the whole of Ireland. The Dublin one is set up like this: the city has been cut up in zones, numbered from 1-24. This seems straightforward but there are some strange complications. The basic idea is this: odd numbers are North of the river Liffey, even numbers are South. Dublin 1 is North City Centre, Dublin 2 is South City Centre. Dublin 3, where I live, is just to the East of Dublin1, but I still live in the city centre. When I walk around the corner and to the end of the street, I’m in Dublin 1. Dublin 4 is then to the South of Dublin 2, and so on until you get to Dublin 24, which is far away, near the Dublin mountains. The basic idea is that, the higher your postal code, the further away you are from central Dublin. A similar system is used in places like Prague and Liverpool. It hasn’t been mapped out very accurately though. Large parts of Dublin 7 are closer to Dublin 1 than parts of Dublin 3. Dublin 5 in its entirety is further from D1 than D7 is. There are further anomalies. The numbers go, as explained up to Dublin 24 on the Southside, but the Northside ends at Dublin 17. Dublin 19, 21 and 23 do not exist even though, logically, they should, considering that Dublin 18, 20, 22 and 24 do. Then there is the odd situation that Dublin 6 has been split up into Dublin 6 and Dublin 6 West. I can’t find any rationale anywhere as to why this is. At first I thought it might be because of its size, but Dublin 4, 11, 15, 18 and 24 are all bigger than 6/6West and were not split up. People actually have strong feelings about this. A friend of mine lived in Dublin 6 West for a few years and, when we were in the pub, someone asked me where she lived, to which I replied “Dublin 6”. She overheard this and was livid. “DUBLIN 6 WEST!!” She shouted from down the bar, with fire in her eyes. She is from the Midlands originally. I worked with a girl for a few years who had lived with her parents in Dublin 9 for her entire life. When she finally moved out at age 30, she moved into a house in Dublin 7. When I asked her a few weeks later how she liked it, she answered that it was nice, but that she could never feel truly at home there because “she was a Dublin 9 person”. A couple of years ago, the Lovin’ Dublin website published a long article in which they rated all Dublin postal codes in order of coolness. It was with no small surge of pride that I found that my home borough of Dublin 3 was crowned the champion borough, even though I had only been living there for 5 or 6 years. I’m not even from Dublin. Or Ireland for that matter.

Look, I can understand that you have strong feelings about your neighborhood. And whether that is working class Ballybough, or posh Ballsbridge or rough Ballymun doesn’t matter. Neighborhoods have a sense of social cohesion. You have a sense of community, a football club to get behind together, and family ties and friendships that go back generations. These postal districts don’t have that. They are arbitrary lines drawn on a map for purposes of mail distribution and city council administration. The neighborhood of Drumcondra, for example, is partly in Dublin 3 and partly in Dublin 9. There is a street in the middle of Dublin 5 that is Dublin 9. It is in no way connected to the rest of D9 and no one knows why. The border between Dublin 5 and Dublin 17 runs through the middle of a housing estate. One final thing to mention on this before we move on, is that the North = Odd, South = Even rule is broken in one place. Phoenix Park, Northside in its majestic entirety, is Dublin 8, which should, logically, be Southside. The reason for this, as I’ve been told, is that Phoenix Park houses, besides Dublin Zoo, a bunch of monuments and a whole lot else, the house of the President. Now, traditionally, the sentiment has always been that the Southside is the posh part of Dublin, and the Northside is the working class part. This is not an entirely realistic depiction because areas like Tallaght and Clondalkin on the Southside are just as working class as Finglas and Ballymun on the North, while areas like Clontarf on the Northside are just as posh and expensive as their Southern counterparts, but because the government has decided they wanted a posh postal code for the President, what can you do? 

The Irish White House

I can be a bit quicker on the country-wide postal code system: every street gets a code, based on the place you live in. So if, for example, you live on 35 O’Connell Street in Dublin 1, your postal code would be D01F5P2. (Nobody actually lives on that address. It’s the address of a pub called Murray’s Bar&Grill and houses a cocktail bar in the basement, a restaurant on the ground floor and a sports bar on the first floor. There used to be a nightclub across the second and third floor but that was closed due to its disappointing performance. It now houses and internet café and a nail salon. But I digress) This goes for every address in a town in Ireland. There are residences, mainly farms, out in the boonies, that aren’t part of any town, it’s just a farmhouse on a hill, so these aren’t covered by this system but, by and large, everyone now has a postcode. This system is called Eircode and every address in the country has received a letter explaining the system and what their code is. 

Okay, so now you have the basic layout of the system and now we get to the main point of the story and the problems caused by the postal code system. I live on a street called Russell Avenue. This, in itself, is not a problem. In fact, I love living here. The problem stems from the fact that there are 3 streets in Dublin called Russell Avenue. Yes, I know. Ridiculous. One of these is out in Tallaght, in Dublin 24. I understand that one. Tallaght used to be a separate town, with its own street naming conventions. It was swallowed up by an ever expanding Dublin some time in the 1980s, so that there is an overlap there, okay, I get that. The problems are with the 3rd Russell Avenue. This one is in a neighborhood called East Wall, near Dublin Port. The problem is that this is also in Dublin3 so the guy who lives there has the exact same address as me. This was never much of an issue, apart from the odd misdirected bank statement, which I would then write EAST WALL on and drop back in the mailbox around the corner. However, with the onset of the COVID19 pandemic and the accompanying lock down of pretty much everything except supermarkets, mr. Adrian Lacatus has discovered Amazon. The first time it started to dawn that this may cause issues was last summer. I was working in the kitchen when the door bell rang. I went to open it and found a delivery guy who said “Package for..” and then the noise of a passing garbage truck drowned out the rest. I accepted it because I thought he had said the name of my flatmate Ana, because her name is sort of similar to Adrian Lacatus. I put the package om the kitchen counter and, when I got some food from the fridge some time later, noticed that the name on the label was not that of my flatmate, but of mr. Lacatus. I decided to have lunch first and then contact the delivery company to point out their mistake. A few minutes later, somebody started frantically pounding on my front door. I thought the front of the house might be on fire, but when I opened the door I only found a nervous Romanian guy who instantly started shouting at me. “YOU HAVE MY PHONE! GIVE ME MY PHONE! I WANT MY PHONE!” I told him to calm the fuck down and that I would get him his precious package. While I walked down the hallway to get his stupid phone (it was actually an Apple TV box) he kept mumbling in pigeon English about his package. When I handed him his package, he calmed down somewhat. “Next time you call me. I give you phone number!” - No, next time put your Eircode in your address details. “My number is 089.. “ - I don’t want your fucking number, I want you to use Eircode so that shit like this doesn’t happen anymore. “Call me next time for package!” - Use your goddamn Eircode!

He then trailed off and got back in his taxi. From then on, I made sure to check the name on the label to prevent accepting deliveries for the other Russell Avenue. I kept getting delivery guys knocking on my door with packages for mr. Lacatus. Time and again, I had to explain them that, yes, this is Russell Avenue, but you’re at the wrong one. Empty stare. “There are 3 streets in Dublin called Russell Avenue. You need to go to the one in East Wall.” More empty stares. “Type in Russell Avenue East Wall on your GPS and you’ll find it”. The problem is, when you type Russell Avenue into Google Maps, which is what most delivery people use for navigation, the first one that shows is my street. Not aware of the situation, they drive to my house and try to offload the crap that my Romanian friend had ordered.

Around Christmas I found, after another delivery service tried to give me something that wasn’t for me, that mr. Lacatus had finally started using his Eircode. I pointed this out to the delivery guy but he didn’t seem to understand, which I think is quite a considerable gap in your skill set if you make a living driving around town delivering packages. After that, the number of misdirected packages coming my way decreased significantly, something I was quite happy with. Then, about 2 weeks ago, while I was out, Ana accidentally accepted 2 packages for some woman called Ilona because, again, a garbage truck drowned out whatever the delivery guy was saying. She tried calling the number on the label but it went straight to voicemail every time. What I also noticed was that she had used the Eircode for our Russell Avenue instead of her own. After a few days I had had enough of it and decided to text the number. Due to the widespread phone scams going on these days, people often don’t pick up the phone when they get a call from a number they don’t recognize. I don’t either. If the screen doesn’t say “Dad” or “Anna” or some other name of my contacts, I just let it ring out. So I sent a text to the number on the label, telling her that I had her packages and that she could pick it up between 11 and 3 and that if she hadn’t picked them up before Friday I would send them back to the manufacturer. About 30 minutes later I got a text from my old friend, telling me that this Ilona was now living with him and that she would contact me about a pick up. I then got a text from her in even worse English than Lacatus’ text messages, saying “Here Ilona. I pick up package today. Where is the address” Where is it? At the address you fucking put in the delivery screen when you ordered it, you idiot! I sent her an instruction to go to Croke Park stadium, wait at the main entrance and text me when she got there. After an hour or so, I got another text saying “I’m at Westward House” This is a building about 200 yards up the road from Croke Park that houses a warehouse for spare car parts, the offices of a courier service and a shop selling plumbing supplies. I told her to look to walk to Croke Park. “I don’t know where is that” - If you have your back to the Westward building, look to your left, and you’ll see a big stadium. Walk towards it and I’ll meet you in front of the main entrance. There’s a queue of people there, for the vaccination centre. “I don’t see” ?? What the fuck? Are you blind AND stupid? It’s the biggest fucking building in Dublin! I told her again to simply walk down the street, towards the bridge and the stadium and that I would meet her at the main entrance. “Okay” I gathered up her packages, walked outside and to the main entrance of the stadium. There was no one there looking like a Romanian who would manage to mis-spell her own postcode. I walked towards the bridge to see if maybe she was there. Nobody. I walked a bit further and only when I eventually got to the Westward building, I saw a 5 foot tall woman with Dwight Schrute glasses and the facial expression of someone who just looked out the window and saw a man riding an ostrich down O'Connell Street. You haven’t moved an inch you stupid cow!! I handed her her packages and gave her a stern talking to, explaining that she was using the wrong Eircode and that she should use the one for EAST WALL in the future. She didn’t seem to comprehend anything I was saying and wandered off down the street. I haven’t received any packages since and, hopefully, the people at the other Russell Avenue have learned their lesson. And now I’m going to contact Dublin City Council to make sure they stop naming any additional streets Russell Avenue. Enjoy your weekend.