How does your mail get delivered? Hi, welcome to curious kids every day. I'm Josh. How are you doing today? It's so good to hear from you. Hey, have you ever mailed a letter to someone before? When you put a letter in your mailbox, what's the next thing you have to do to let your mail person know that there's a letter that you need to have sent out? There's something on the mailbox that you flip up. Do you know what it is? Yep, it's that little flag. Isn't it cool that you can just place a letter in this box in front of your house and then someone from the post office comes to your house and picks up the letter? And then a few days later, your letter gets to the person you mailed it to. Now, not everybody has a mailbox in front of their house. Sometimes you might live in an apartment complex where you just take your mail up to the front office. My wife and I, when we first got married, we lived in a townhouse and we didn't have our own mailbox. We had to walk down the street to this box that contained everybody's mailboxes in the neighborhood. That was where we dropped off mail and it was also where I picked up my mail. I had a little key and I had to unlock my box in the bigger box and get my mail every day. And every day I did that, I just thought about how on earth do the mail people keep track of all the mail. I think it'd be hard enough just to keep track of my mail, but they do that for thousands of people in my area and then millions of people all over the country. How does the post office keep track of all the mail? How do they figure out how to send all of it? The post office can send so much mail because every piece of mail has a destination address. A destination address tells the postal system where something is supposed to go. It usually includes a person's name, a street address, a city, a state, and a zip code. And the zip code is especially helpful. A zip code is a group of numbers that helps sort mail into the right area. Have you ever noticed that five number code at the end of your address? Sometimes it's even longer, but it always has at least five numbers. That's the zip code. Machines and workers use the zip code along with the full address to quickly send mail in the right direction. Where I live here in Nashville, Tennessee, we have lots of different zip codes, but they all start with the same two numbers, three, seven. I've lived in a few different places over the years, but my zip code always started with three, seven. So if a post office in California sees that a piece of mail has a zip code starting in three, seven, starting in three, seven, they know which direction it's headed. It's headed toward Tennessee. But before that mail is shipped off to Tennessee, it has to be collected in the first place. A mail carrier picks up mail from a few different places. They might get it from your mailbox like we've already talked about. They might pick it up from those blue collection boxes you see around town, or they might just get it straight from the post office. Have you and your parents ever dropped off a package directly at the post office? And then from there, the mail is taken to a postal facility where it gets sorted. To sort something means to put it into the right group. Now a lot of this sorting is done by machines. The machines can scan the front of letters and look for the address. And they can read lots of addresses very quickly. You've ever seen a video of how this works, it's pretty wild. And it makes the machine's job a lot easier if the address is clear and easy to read. Sometimes packages and letters get lost, but if the address is on the package or the letter nice and clearly easy to read, you've got a much higher chance that it's going to get to where it's supposed to go. After that, the mail is grouped by where it needs to travel. Some letters stay in the same town, some go to another state, some are marked to travel by trucks, some are marked to travel by airplane. The goal is to move everything as quickly and efficiently as possible. Now when the mail arrives near the right town or city, it gets sorted again. This time it's sorted even more carefully, down to the local post office, or even the route a mail carrier will drive. When your mailman or mail lady delivers your mail, does the mail truck start on the other side of the road first, or do they come down your side of the street first? But whichever way they do it in your neighborhood, they already have all the mail sorted in their truck in the right order so that it's easy to place in the mail boxes as they go. So they have the mail for your neighbor to the left, and then they have your mail, and then they have the mail for the neighbor to your right, and sometimes it gets a little mixed up. I watched my poor mail lady bounce back and forth multiple times yesterday, trying to make sure all the mail got to the right houses on my street. I think she went to one house like three times. I think what happened was she might have dropped some of the mail onto the floor of the truck, and then she was trying to pick it up and make sure it all got to where it was supposed to go, but it was out of order, so she had to keep going back and forth to different houses over and over again. The mail service is a very complex system that runs incredibly efficiently because it's been perfected over many years. Yes, sometimes packages get lost or damaged in the mail, but for the most part, considering how many billions of pieces of mail the post office handles, it's pretty remarkable how well it all works. In fact, I looked it up. Do you know how many pieces of mail the United States Postal Service handles every day? Are you ready for this? The United States Postal Service handles every single piece of mail. It handles over 300 million pieces of mail every day. Isn't that crazy? And it all starts with an address. As soon as you have the address of someone in your family or one of your friends, as soon as you have it memorized, you can write them a letter and then place it in an envelope, then write the address on that envelope. Once you've put a stamp in the top right corner, you can place it in the mailbox and flip up the flag. My kids love sending letters to their grandparents. Even though they all live close by, it's still fun to put something in the mail and then imagine the journey it's going on, on its way to their grandparents' house. All right, let's have a quick quiz. What part of the address helps sort mail into the right area quickly? That is the zip code. Do you know what the word zip stands for? I didn't realize that zip was an acronym, but ZIP is an acronym. It stands for Zone Improvement Project. The postal service came up with the idea of zip codes in the 1960s to make it easier to sort and deliver mail. All right, let's play true or false? True or false? The post office depends on one person remembering where every letter needs to go. No, that's false. That would be impossible. True or false? Letters can travel by truck or airplane. Yep, that's true. True or false? A clear address helps the postal system do its job. Yes, that's true. True or false? Mail only gets sorted one time. That is false. It gets sorted multiple times. Would you rather be a mail person who delivers the mail to your neighborhood or would you rather be a mail worker who helps sort the mail at the post office? I've always loved getting to talk to the mailman or the mail lady in our neighborhood, so I think I would rather deliver mail to my neighborhood so I could get to know my neighbors a little bit better. All right, let's play a round of what am I? What am I? I am made of numbers. I help show what area a letter should go. And I am part of an address. What am I? I am the zip code. And do you remember what zip stands for? Zone improvement project. Now, there's one more thing about sending a letter that we haven't talked about today. It's called the return address, and this is why it's important that you have your address memorized too. See, when you send a letter, you not only put the destination address on the envelope, you also need to put your address on the envelope. It's called the return address. So in the top left corner of the envelope, you write your own address. Do you know why you do that? Well, just in case your letter can't be delivered, maybe the destination address is incorrect, the return address lets the post office know where to send the letter back. So if you've ever gotten your own letter placed back into your mailbox after weeks or even months, that's why. It's called return to sender. And it's just a way for you to know, hey, this letter did not make it to its destination. So memorizing addresses is very important. Hey, I've got a challenge. Why don't you think of somebody you want to send a letter to and then memorize their address? Then you can draw them a picture or write them a note, put it in the mailbox and send it off. Now, I don't want to speak out of turn, but I bet if you send a letter to someone, they'll probably send you a letter back. What kind of question do you think we'll ask tomorrow on Curious Kids every day? I can't wait to find out. So until then, keep asking questions and stay curious kids. And we've got a few birthdays today. Today is Nilly's birthday. Nilly is from Israel and Nilly is turning six. Happy birthday, Nilly. Darcy is from Adelaide, South Australia and Darcy is turning seven. Happy birthday, Darcy. Monty is from Washington state and Monty is turning six. Happy birthday, Monty. Xavier is from Maryland and Xavier is turning five. Happy birthday, Xavier. Charlotte is from Texas and Charlotte is turning six. Happy birthday, Charlotte. Lee is from Colorado and Lee is turning 10. Happy birthday, Lee. Emma is from Colorado and Emma is turning six. Happy birthday, Emma. Talia is from Virginia and Talia is turning seven. Happy birthday, Talia. And Levi is from Arizona and Levi is turning eight. Happy birthday, Levi. Do all the grown-ups listening if you're a Curious Kid once their birthday mentioned on the show? Please visit supportcuriouskids.com and join the Curious Kids Club. That's supportcuriouskids.com. See you tomorrow.
