Piglet, Pooh and PAF: Holding property names like 'Trespassers W' in Royal Mailâs Alias address file.

October 2016 marks the 90th anniversary of the publication of the first Winnie the Pooh book. Those of you that remember these stories as fondly as I do may remember that one of the problems of living in a Hundred Acre Wood is that the main characters live in houses inside of trees, and there are a lot of trees in a Hundred Acre Wood.

The dog-eared edition of the book that I have features a map of the woods at the front to help you find your way around. My two favourite characters, however, used an ingenious method for letting others know where they lived. Pooh lived to the West of the Woods ‘under the name of Sanders’… which meant he had a sign nailed over his doorway with the name of Sanders written on it in gold letters. Piglet lived in a beech tree in the middle of the forest, identifiable by a broken board outside which read ‘Trespassers W’.

Of course, if Royal Mail had been delivering post to the characters in the story the postal addresses will have been in PAF and the trees would have numbers rather than names. But Pooh and Piglet would probably still have used ‘Sanders’ and ‘Trespassers W’ as property identifiers to help people sending things to them. In that case the call centre taking Pooh’s order for more honey wouldn’t immediately have been able to capture his correct postal address from the answer ‘under the name of Sanders’ and the website taking Piglet’s order for ‘haycorns’ may not have recognised ‘Trespassers W’ as part of the address, unless, of course, the solutions used the additional information readily available to all PAF customers in the Alias files.

Read the full blog: https://goo.gl/HvUAwa