A Tale of Information Management - the United States Postal Service

Last week, while I was away from my home office, the United States Postal Service attempted to deliver a letter to me that required a signature. I wasn't home, so they left a slip in my mailbox. 

As you can see, the slip includes instructions on how to schedule a redelivery, either by scanning a QR code or by going to https://usps.com/redelivery. There's a 16-digit (4 x 4) article number below that. I went to the website, and it's a four-step process. 

Step 1: Check if redelivery is available for your address. I entered my address, NOT as shown on the slip, but as an actual address. More on that in a minute. I spelled out "Street", and I didn't use a ZIP+4 ZIP code, but when I clicked the Check Availability button, the page refreshed, the address was reformatted to all caps and with "ST" instead of "Street", and the ZIP code had also been updated to the ZIP+4. 

Step 2: Select packages for redelivery. The instructions, verbatim: "Enter a tracking or barcode number shown on the back of your PS Form 3849, We ReDeliver for You! All packages in a single Redelivery request must be associated to the same PS Form 3849."

It asks you to enter a Tracking or Barcode Number; the slip identifies my letter as an Article Number as noted above. I entered the code, both as a 16-digit number and as 4 4-digit numbers. Either way, when I clicked the magnifying glass to search for the number, I got an error, "The address entered for this tracking number does not match the original delivery address. See FAQs

To send the package to a different address than the original delivery address, please use Package Intercept. To modify the Redelivery address, go back to Step 1 and select Edit." I also tried the QR code, which took me to the same form and produced the same results. 

At the top of that error, there was a tracking number listed, a 20-digit code with no resemblance to the one I entered. 

Needless to say, Step 3 and Step 4 were right out. 

Next, I tried the Package Intercept. Both the original article number on the slip and the tracking number generated in Step 2 were unable to be intercepted for any of a number of vague and vaguely technical reasons. 

So I went back to Step 2 and the FAQs. I copied my error, "The address entered for this tracking number does not match the original delivery address" and, sure enough, there was an entry for that. The explanation for that error was, "Redelivery cannot be requested because the original tracking number does not match the original address." Very, very helpful....

I mentioned the address above. On the slip, the entirety of the address hand-printed on the slip was "Street number street name", e.g., "123 main". No street, no city, no state, no ZIP. 

As of now, there is no way for me to schedule a redelivery because whatever address the USPS has for me, for this letter, is not the same as my standard mailing address nor as the USPS-reformatted one. I thought literally the entire point of ZIP+4 was to identify an actual street address (or PO Box), yet that seems to be failing me here.  

How does this relate to information management? Metadata. Again, the USPS is relying on metadata to identify me and confirm that I am entitled to this letter. However, something is off between what they have in this confirmation system and what their master addresses list shows and uses. I know they have a very sophisticated approach to address recognition - have you SEEN some peoples' handwriting in addressing envelopes? - yet it's failing here for what has to be an absolutely simple, yet unforeseen, reason.