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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm excellent. How are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm lovely and in part, the reason why I am so lovely this fine day, we get to continue our discussion of the government assigning numbers.
N. Rodgers: We do, but I have a question for you about our previous episode.
J. Aughenbaugh: Our previous episode listeners, we looked at social security numbers and EINs which are Employer Identification Numbers handed out by the IRS, the former number is handed out by the Social Security Administration. Your question?
N. Rodgers: Will they ever reuse a social security number?
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: Wasn't there a time when they thought they might?
J. Aughenbaugh: They might because they were predicting much of the world that there would be this huge population explosion and they would run out of numbers.
N. Rodgers: But turns out we stopped having babies?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That worked out, didn't it? Although there is the chance that with sufficient immigration, you could conceivably eventually run out of numbers where in the future and then they might have to add a 10th digit. That what they do, they would just add another digit the way they do with license plate because I know when license plates started, I think they were just like one or two digits because there weren't that many cars, not that many people own them or whatever. Now, in some states, they've had to have a bunch of digits because like in California, everybody and their cat and their dog all own cars.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. You're correct. Most states when they first started producing motor vehicle license tags, what we refer to as license plates, most of them only had a couple of digits, three at most, because again, the assumption was only the wealthiest of residents would be able to own a vehicle. Of course, once Henry Ford came up with the assembly line and started making automobiles affordable for working class American families and then we started building highways all over the place you had many more people who wanted automobiles.
N. Rodgers: Although, funny story, the first two cars in Ohio ran into each other.
J. Aughenbaugh: That is true. Yes.
N. Rodgers: They were only two cars in Ohio and they found each other and hit each other. Which I just think is both sad and funny. Maybe at some point we could try to delve into the mysteries of the DMV and how they assign numbers, but we're doing federal numbers right now.
J. Aughenbaugh: We are doing federal numbers?
N. Rodgers: DMV and all of that stuff is done by the state those are not federal.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: They're not regulated federally. We'll get to state numbers maybe further down the road.
J. Aughenbaugh: Road. That's right.
N. Rodgers: But, right now, we get to talk about my favorite codes that I don't really understand which are ZIP codes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: What does ZIP stand for?
J. Aughenbaugh: ZIP actually stands for Zone Improvement Plan. Interestingly enough, the United States Postal Service did not officially begin to use ZIP codes until 1963.
N. Rodgers: Really?
J. Aughenbaugh: They did not use them before 1963.
N. Rodgers: Before that, they just had to know where you were by just knowing where you were? Like your street address and then I guess somebody who delivered mail to you knew what area that was and they'd say, Bob, take all the people who live on this street take their mail and they would just go down that street and give out your mail.
J. Aughenbaugh: But what's interesting is as the United States Postal Service became more technologically advanced and began to use mainframe computers, etc, the Postal Service pitched to the United States Congress the idea that postal service could be quicker and more efficient if you actually had first, before you actually had the ZIP code, they went ahead and pitched the idea of abbreviations for state names. That was the first code.
N. Rodgers: Oh, I guess that would have to come first. How are we going to differentiate each of the states, especially all the M-states?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It's not so bad for the states like Utah where there's just the one U, but when you get into the M-states and the N-states, there a way bunches of those differentiating Missouri and Mississippi, can't be calling both MI, Missouri is MO, and Mississippi is MI. I think that's right.
J. Aughenbaugh: The computer program that they used only allowed for 23, if you will positions in a line. If you had a locality that had a long name, how did you go ahead and fit within the 23, if you will position or 23 characters? That's what actually led to the abbreviation of state names.
N. Rodgers: Little Rock, Arkansas.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: But you get into longer providence Rhode Island. Now you're past 23.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you have cities that start with North blah, blah, blah, state.
N. Rodgers: Clarification, by the way, Mississippi is MS, Michigan is MI.
J. Aughenbaugh: Michigan is MI, Mississippi's MS, Missouri is MO.
N. Rodgers: But somebody had to come through and do all that? You have Alabama and Alaska, they can't both be AL.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Then your mail will end up on a frozen tundra, and if you're from Selma, that's not so good.
J. Aughenbaugh: Alabama gets AL, but Alaska is?
N. Rodgers: AK.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Now, the most recent change to a state abbreviation actually was Nebraska and that actually came at the request of the Canadian Post Office Department. Canada went ahead and made the argument that NB, which was Nebraska's first abbreviation, was somewhat confusing because in Canada they have a province New Brunswick. You had residents of New Brunswick that were receiving mail that was intended for Nebraskans and Nebraskans were getting mail that was intended for residents of New Brunswick, Canada.
N. Rodgers: How that would happen is not weird street name, but it's a common street name. If you're live at 2321 Main Street of some city that happens to have the same name, Smith Town or whatever, some generically named place, then I could see why that would happen. But I do think it's interesting that we care about Canada and their postal codes. That implies that there's a fair bit of mail that goes to Canada.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Otherwise, the Canadians complaining about it, we would have just said, but we don't care, moving on but we clearly care.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. We changed the abbreviation for Nebraska. Nia, I know this additional piece of information is of interest to you. We get ZIP codes in 1963. In 1983, the Postal Service introduced the ZIP code plus four so you would have the five digits of the ZIP code plus an additional four to go ahead and provide greater specificity to aid in the efficient delivery of mail.
N. Rodgers: I have to admit I don't use the four digits most of the time.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, the Postal Service basically just gave that up in the 1980s because the American public basically refused to comply.
N. Rodgers: It's like the metric system. Remember how they told us we were all going to go metric and the population of a nation said we can't handle metric. It's too even, it's too easy, we can handle this, we'd rather keep our inches and feet and all the other measurements that make no sense and are based on numbers that aren't round. Made metric go away and the rest of us we're just like, it'd be a lot easier for your [inaudible] .
J. Aughenbaugh: I remember, Nia, in grade school, where we spent an entire quarter learning the metric equivalents of US measurements and again, that's one of those examples of things you learned in school that when you get older, you're just like, I've never used that, I would never use this. In fact, the only time I actually use it is when I run road races because it's usually measured in meters or kilometers, a 10 kilometer race. But I've learned the equivalent, which is 6.2 miles.
N. Rodgers: The time that I generally use metric is in cooking. If you get a recipe from pretty much anywhere outside the United States, everything is going to be in grams and liters. But can we mention a couple of the guys who were responsible for because they have great names? A loves me a good name.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, you do. Now, the person who is credited with coming up with the the zip code is Robert Moon.
N. Rodgers: Yes. Robert Moon in 1944. He was saying we should probably standardize areas. Although it didn't happen because of course we're the United States and we have to wait 20 or so years in order to make things. With climate change activists now are saying we must fix it now. We're like we'll get to it. Because that's how we roll here in the States.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, and also too most postal carriers knew their communities so well that there wasn't a lot of support within the Postal Service for the change.
N. Rodgers: I'm not surprised by that actually. You're going to make people memorize something that they don't need to because we know where they live. But then we start getting a huge amount of movement, I would imagine in the '40s and '50s, and after the war, then you're certainly people are everywhere and we have no idea who these people are.
J. Aughenbaugh: Also, remember too World War II was the first war where the United States like many nations began to use computers. After the war, as the rest of the federal government began to learn how the War Department then the Department of Defense used computers, they began to also use technology. By the time it got to the Postal Service, the way the Postal Service pitched it to Congress was your constituents, representative so and so, or senator so and so will now get their mail in two days. Instead of it taking a week, sometimes 10 days. Again, for our younger listeners, yes, guys, the United States Postal Service.
N. Rodgers: Used to guarantee.
J. Aughenbaugh: Used to guarantee that you will get the mail within a certain time frame.
N. Rodgers: They don't do that really anymore.
J. Aughenbaugh: They don't do that anymore, but they used to, and it was all predicated on zip codes in state abbreviations.
N. Rodgers: But Moon only came up with the first three numbers of the zip code, because he thought three would be enough, silly him. But then again, think about the population in 1944 and then the population 20 years later, in the '60s, when they come up with the five-digit zip code, somebody said, we're going to have a lot more people. We're going to have a lot more people to deliver to.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, much like the social security number, the five digits of the zip code are actually used for specific purposes. Nia, you just mentioned the first three. The first three describe the sectional center facility or in the parlance of the Postal Service, the Sec Center. I did not say sex. I said sec.
N. Rodgers: S-E-C.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Sec Center, Sectional Center.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. The SCF is the central mail processing facility with those three digits. For instance, let's say Nia you go to a post office box and your mail a letter because I know you mail letters, you mail cards, etc.. That will get read at a post office and then it gets sent overnight to an SCF. In the morning the SCF, and the only reason why that SCF has received it is because a computer, a scanner at a post office will read those first three digits.
N. Rodgers: Which by the way, I'm going to put to you that the post office is more advanced than NASA. Here's why. Have you ever tried to read other people's handwriting? It's horrible and especially numbers. One of the reasons for that is if you look at the way a two is written by my grandmother with the big curly bottom and the thing at the top, and then you'd look at the way it's written by me where it looks almost like a Z, the machine has to know that both of those things are a two
J. Aughenbaugh: Or think about one Nia.
N. Rodgers: One was the tail, the one without the tail, and one with the bottom, one that's just a line.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or sevens.
N. Rodgers: Or fours.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or fours.
N. Rodgers: You've got a lot of hard numbers.
J. Aughenbaugh: Many Americans sometimes will transpose sixes with nines and the post office computer, scanner figures that out.
N. Rodgers: It's pretty amazing. You think the shuttle is amazing, but I'm just putting to you that anybody who can read the handwriting of that many Americans because think about it, we're doctors, we're lawyers, we're teachers, we're accountants, were blue collar. We all learned to write numbers differently.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Then there's the French 7 where you have the seven and then the line through it. There's all these things. I'm assuming that what happens is the skin or spits out once that it doesn't have to be read by a human.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Then somebody has to go through and try to figure out where the heck you're trying to send this thing and then put it in the right bin. We have a distribution center here in Richmond, so what you're saying is somebody mails me a letter from Topeka. The first thing it's going to do overnight is come to the main Richmond SCF, the central spot.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sent out to the individual post offices, which are based on the last two digits.
N. Rodgers: It comes to that Richmond spot and because I live in Mechanicsville, those last two numbers tell it, this needs to go over to the post office in Mechanicsville.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Then the Mechanicsville person is then responsible for separating it and figuring out which carrier it goes to because there's a bunch of carriers in each city.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, those scanners. Again, because this is a government agency, we need to have an acronym. It is the multiple line optical character reader, the MLOC.
N. Rodgers: MLOC. That's pretty impressive that thing can do that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, the last two digits determine which post-office it goes to and then to which character it will be actually placed into their truck.
N. Rodgers: Each carrier.
J. Aughenbaugh: For instance, as Nia's pointing out, the Richmond area is generally 232.
N. Rodgers: Mine is 231. There's more than one distribution center here.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or the distribution center will handle multiple first three digits.
N. Rodgers: I see. It could all be one facility that handles 231, 232, and 234.
J. Aughenbaugh: For instance, in Northern Virginia, their sectional center facility is assigned codes 220, 221, 222, 223.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now, where things get somewhat complicated is if you actually have ZIP codes that cross state boundaries. You will see this, for instance, with military facilities that span multiple states. The example I've found in my research was ZIP code 42223 serves Fort Campbell, and that spans Kentucky and Tennessee.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, that doesn't confuse things.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or the zip code 97635 includes portions of Lake County, Oregon, and I'm going to mispronounce this, so I apologize for the residents. Modoc County, M-O-D-O-C County in Northern California. It's so rural.
N. Rodgers: I was going to say, well, why wouldn't you just cut that off? But I see, it's rural. There's probably parts of Montana, there's probably parts of North Dakota that do the same thing. They edge up. Population, makes more sense to break it up by number of people because you don't want the male deliverer to have to drive 85 miles to deliver you mail. You want it to be a relatively tight delivery space.
J. Aughenbaugh: A good example of what you're describing because this location has been in the news, because of all the rain and snow the California and Nevada been getting. But the Reno area which spans California to Nevada has one ZIP code.
N. Rodgers: Really?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, 961 because there's not a lot of people who live there permanently. It's a vacation spot. It's a tourist spot, but they have one ZIP code. Now, if you might be thinking, how does the postal service assign ZIP codes? Well, much like the social security administration, with social security numbers, it started first in New England and then spread South and West.
N. Rodgers: Which is pretty much how the English population started in the United States. It seems like it's a thing that we do. You show up at a spot. Not the native population, but the English population.
J. Aughenbaugh: The settlement pattern of non-indigenous individuals in the United States.
N. Rodgers: Was New England, then South, then West.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. ZIP code starting with zero are in New England, New Jersey, and some of our territories and military bases. Then you move down into New York, Massachusetts.
N. Rodgers: What's the lowest ZIP code number?
J. Aughenbaugh: 00501, and it's assigned to the IRS service center in Portville, New York. By the way, this is important for the IRS because again, I know many listeners of this podcast may do their tax returns electronically, but millions of Americans still fill out paper tax returns. The IRS has regional tax centers to just collect tax returns. There's like a half a dozen of them across the United States, and each of them has their own particular ZIP code just to handle the volume of mail.
N. Rodgers: Well, that makes sense. I'm going to throw something out here and ask if this is true because I'm just thinking through as a thought thing. I know that the Virginia Commonwealth University has its own ZIP code.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That's in part because we have a huge number of residential students, but we also do a huge amount of mail on this campus. There's a lot of things that come to campus. I would think that if you didn't have a zip code devoted to us and you just had us as a Richmond ZIP code, it would take a lot longer to distribute the regular citizens male, that is not part of VCU. Similarly with the IRS, if an IRS Tax Center shared a ZIP code with the people in town, they would never get their mail. It would take forever to sort. Just by sheer volume, I'm not saying that the postal workers wouldn't do their best. I'm saying that by volume alone. Nobody in town would ever get mail. They'd be like, oh, don't mail it to me, just send it by carrier pigeon, it'll get here faster. Just as a side note, where we are is our ZIP codes all start with two, because we're in Virginia, but that's also North Carolina.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way Nia, before 2001, there were six ZIP codes lower than 00501. Those were all attached to diversity immigrant visa programs to receive applications from non-US citizens.
N. Rodgers: Wait, what number was that?
J. Aughenbaugh: Until 2001, there were six ZIP codes lower than the one that is currently used by Portville New York. These were numbered 00210200215 and were used by diversity immigrant visa programs to receive applications from non-US citizens seeking Visas, for various purposes to be in the United States.
N. Rodgers: That makes sense because that would speed those up. A lot of the way it's distributed is to speed up the delivery of the mail, is what I think you're saying. I wonder if you get a new zip code if, let's just say that you and I tomorrow started a university, I probably until it's a certain size, it's just along with the town. We're now here in Canvas, it's just along with the town. But then at some point it becomes problematic in terms of speeding up the delivery and so they say, we're going to give you a zip code of your own.
J. Aughenbaugh: That touches upon, for instance, some big businesses, and you think about, for instance, Amazon distribution centers.
N. Rodgers: They've got to have at least one ZIP code of their own.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or think about, for instance, certain places in regards to the shipping of Christmas gifts. These are all concerns that the postal service has to take into account if they want to be able to deliver mail efficiently and effectively. Again, our expectations have changed over time. We've discussed this in the previous podcast episode about the postal service. But so many of our innovations in regards to delivering commerce have occurred because of the postal service and the postal service picking up on trends that are going on in other sectors of American life. Think about, for instance, the IRS push to have more American submit their tax returns electronically. Well, there has to be consultation between the IRS and the postal service, because if Americans aren't using electronic submissions of tax returns, then the postal service better have what scheduled the night that's all due.
N. Rodgers: That's all due. I was about to say that remember when we were kids and the post office stayed open until midnight on April 15th, tax day, they would stay up until midnight because lunatics like my parents would be driving up at 10:30 and handing over their mail to go to the IRS and it needed to be stamped on the right day or it would be considered late. That's why it used to be that you end still with balloting, your ballot has to be stamped by a certain date in order to be received, or it'll be contested as a ballot in many states and they tell you what that date is. It can be posted no later than, and they give you whatever that day is. It's a whole thing. I always do mine electronically, but I do know there are people who find great comfort in paper. Some people when you're doing an incredibly long form and you've got 75,000 things that you have to put in your tax form, you want to do it in paper because it's easier for you to manage. But the other thing that I remember from childhood and I know it's not childhood as in, I was born after 1963 for those who are wondering here. But there were still coming a holdover of that when people would ride out part of the state name, when you would send something to my grandparents in Virginia, you would write VIR or Alabama ALA or California CALIF. People did that and they still did that. When I was born well after 1963 when this changed over to two letters. Which I think is funny because it's just shows how hard it is to get change especially when they've been doing it X way.
N. Rodgers: Then all of a sudden you're like, what is this with your two-letter abbreviation thing? You forward thinking individual?
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, you and I have been in Richmond long enough, remember when the United States Postal Service made it very clear that here in Richmond, that if you lived in Henrico versus living in Richmond, even if you wrote the correct ZIP code, you should use the correct local government jurisdiction. There was this big to do about because many of us, when we move to Richmond, we understand that we may live in a surrounding county outside of Richmond, but nevertheless, we would always write Richmond, Virginia and then our ZIP code. But I remember the postal service. Here in this region was just like, you all need to go ahead and write the correct local government jurisdiction.
N. Rodgers: You need to write Henrico, or you need to write Chesterfield.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or Hannover County.
N. Rodgers: Even though you would not say those things to any human who asks you where you live. If somebody outside, if you were a guest speaker right at a panel and somebody said, where are you from, Dr. Aughenbaugh? You would say I'm from Richmond. You wouldn't say I'm from Henrico because they'd be like what's that?
J. Aughenbaugh: As far as my family is concerned up in North Central Pennsylvania, I don't live in Henrico, I live in Richmond. When they send me cards, they still put Richmond, Virginia and it gets to my mailbox.
N. Rodgers: It get's to you.
J. Aughenbaugh: But nevertheless, this was a big deal.
N. Rodgers: Change is hard.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you ask local government officials who work in those various jurisdictions, if somebody says they were for a Rico county, they don't work for the city of Richmond.
N. Rodgers: Well, and part of part of why they draw these lines here in places like here is that politically the money is split up by those jurisdictions and they prove things by those jurisdictions. Henrico needs this amount of money because we do this amount of whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: They don't want it all listed under the umbrella of Richmond because that would give Richmond's Mayor power over them that they don't necessarily want or shouldn't have.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: But that also as part of the weirdness of living in Virginia, by the way, is that you can have a city that's not part of a county in Richmond, and that is a mutant freakish thing that is not true in most other states. In most other states, your city is part of a county that's part of a state.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's not just cities in Virginia. There are towns located within counties, and the towns are independent. For instance, Charlottesville is independent from Albemarle County?
N. Rodgers: That's weird.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, the two examples I'm mentioning are college towns. Because University of Virginia's in Charlottesville and Virginia Tech is located in Blacksburg, which is a town, but is independent of the surrounding county.
N. Rodgers: That's weird. It's weird here in Virginia, we love Virginia, but it's weird.
J. Aughenbaugh: But the last thing I wanted to mention, the highest ZIP code, the highest number, the largest code.
N. Rodgers: Wait.
J. Aughenbaugh: What?
N. Rodgers: Before you mention the highest one, so they go from east to west? Like zero is New England and then all of our stuff that we own in Europe, which is east of here, it's all of our military bases and stuff like that. It's the Virgin Islands, which is East.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Puerto Rico. East.
N. Rodgers: Puerto Rico, which is east. The Middle East, which is east unless you think of it as very far west. But anyway, all of that and then you get like one is Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, and two is district to Columbia, Maryland, North Carolina, blah, blah, blah. Then and then Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia is three, and Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, that's four. You see how we're going west? When you talk about the highest number, you are talking about.
J. Aughenbaugh: Alaska.
N. Rodgers: You were talking about the number nine which is.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nine, 9.
N. Rodgers: Alaska, American Samoa, California, Guam, it's all the stuff that we own that's west. I think even west of the coastal United States from Marshall Islands, Northern Mariana.
J. Aughenbaugh: Ketchikan, Alaska.
N. Rodgers: Oh, Ketchikan. It's a lovely place.
J. Aughenbaugh: Has 99950. That's the highest ZIP code.
N. Rodgers: Oh, is it?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes it is.
N. Rodgers: Oh, I like Ketchikan. Ketchikan is about 20 people and then if it's tourist season, it explodes to be several thousand people because it's a tourist town.
J. Aughenbaugh: How do you know that?
N. Rodgers: Because I went there. I went there on a cruise, we stopped, and I'll tell you listeners, if you ever get to go on Alaska cruise one once in a lifetime, it was totally fabulous. We were blessed with great weather, which was wonderful. It didn't rain the entire time we were there, which is weird because it rains in Alaska a lot. But the cruise ships in Ketchikan, when they say we're in the city, they mean we are in the city. I don't throw like Aughie throws a baseball, like a guy who throws a baseball, like he's really good at that, he did that in high school. He could probably throw a baseball pretty far. He might be able to throw it to the other side of Ketchikan from where you are on the ship. When my roommate said we're here, I got up and I looked out over the balcony and I was looking down on a sidewalk.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's great.
N. Rodgers: I was like, oh, hey, we're really in town. okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's fabulous.
N. Rodgers: Which is really cool. But I would I would recommend any Alaska cruise to folks because any of the cities in Alaska like that. A lot of them are tourist towns. I kid about it being 20 people, but their population swells to four or five times during the cruise seasons when they get lots of tourists and stuff. They were hard done by with COVID because of course no tourism.
J. Aughenbaugh: No tourism.
N. Rodgers: What do you do when you're when you make your living off of the tourist season and there's no tourists and yet I felt real sympathy for them. But I am fascinated one by the fact that it's another nine number.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: This is 5-4.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: EIN is 2-7?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Social Security is 3-2-4.
J. Aughenbaugh: Four. Yes.
N. Rodgers: ZIP codes are 5-4, except that we just as a group said, we don't care about that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Thanks anyways.
N. Rodgers: You can make us try to put them on there, but we're not going to. But what's weird is you still see them from companies, like on catalogs and stuff, you still see your other digits, like all of a sudden I'm like, all right, I have nine digits to my ZIP code.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or I'll go ahead and see it when I place an order online and I type in my address and the next line, gives me the ZIP code with all nine digits and I'm like, you know I should know that?
N. Rodgers: But I don't and I don't care. But I would like to point out that at VCU.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Your department's box number is the last four digits so it actually is important.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: If you want to help out VCU's mail service to get something to you quickly is to tell them which box you're in which meaning which box literally which building you're in, and each of the buildings have a different box number, which I'm assuming that we're not unusual in that they probably institutions actually use those four digits so maybe if you listeners are going to mail something to someone at an institution, you might consider adding those other four digits if you can find them to help speed it along just to help with ease of delivery. Unless you're sending something to the IRS and you want to drag your feet as long as possible, in which case, do you. This is really been interesting Aughie. I did not realize how clearly the ZIP code numbers traveled across the west.
J. Aughenbaugh: West. Yes.
N. Rodgers: It makes sense to me because I live on the East Coast. I feel certain that people live on the West Coast are like really, you couldn't start here just once. Just once you couldn't give us maybe the next big number, oh, when I'm president and we have to assign some big number. Let's start with the West Coast. That'll make them feel included.
J. Aughenbaugh: Hawaii or Alaska?
N. Rodgers: Yes. I don't know what number will come up with, but well, let's make a note to do that Aughie, when I'm president.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'll add that to the list.
N. Rodgers: To the list.
J. Aughenbaugh: We've already identified that when you become president, I'll be your chief of staff.
N. Rodgers: That's right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Nia, great episode. Thank you.
N. Rodgers: Thank you. Aughie.
You've been listening to civil discourse brought to you by VCU Libraries. Opinions expressed are solely the speaker's own and do not reflect the views or opinions of VCU or VCU Libraries. Special thanks to the Workshop for technical assistance. Music by Isaak Hopson. Find more information at guides.library.vcu.edu/discourse. As always, no documents were harmed in the making of this podcast.