Spread five / Left leaf / An address, as typed

Labelling, manifests and the handover

A label is read by a stranger in the rain. Everything about how one is written follows from that.

Specimen — address field, as entered

flat 2 the old bakery
chapel st
middlesbrough

“it’s the blue door next to the shop, the buzzer doesn’t work”

— postcode field: left empty

Everything needed to deliver this parcel is on the page except the one thing that routes it. The building is named, the flat is numbered, the street is abbreviated in a way a human reads without pausing, and the colour of the door is more use on the step than any of it. The postcode is missing, which means the order stops at the desk until it is confirmed — not guessed from the street name, and not completed from a lookup that returns four possibilities.

The note about the buzzer is not an address. It is an access note, and it has exactly one place to be: on the label, where the person at the door will read it. Put it in the address block and it becomes a line of an address that does not exist; leave it on the order record and nobody who needs it will ever see it.

Spread five / Right leaf / Label, manifest, van

What goes on a label

Five things, in a fixed arrangement, with white space around each so that no two can be read as one.

  1. The delivery address, one element per line, the postcode on its own line in capitals at the bottom. Nothing abbreviated that was not abbreviated by the customer.
  2. The access note, directly beneath the address, in a smaller face — near enough to be read in the same glance, different enough not to be mistaken for part of the address.
  3. The order reference, which is the only string that joins this parcel back to a record here.
  4. Parcel number out of the total for that order — 1 of 2, 2 of 2 — printed even when the total is one, because a parcel marked 1 of 1 cannot be mistaken for half of a split order.
  5. The return address, which is this office, in full, small, at the top. A parcel that cannot be delivered has to be able to come home.

What is not on the label: the contents, the value, and anything about what the box is worth to anybody. A label describes a destination.

Right leaf / Counted and signed

The manifest and the handover

1 On the parcel
A despatch label: the return address small at the top, the delivery address in the middle with the postcode on its own line, the access note beneath it in a smaller face, and the order reference with the parcel count at the foot. TS6 6HH REF · 1 OF 2 Describes a destination. Nothing on it says what is inside or what it is worth.
2 On the manifest
One line of a manifest, ruled into columns: parcel reference, order reference, parcel number out of total, mass, and a column for the access note, with a signature rule beneath. PARCEL ORDER KG 1 PARCEL = 1 LINE DRIVER OFFICE Describes a count. A two-parcel order appears twice, because two things will be lifted.

The manifest is printed before the collection and lists every parcel going out: parcel reference, order reference, parcel number out of total, mass, and the access note where there is one. It is a list of objects, not of orders.

At the handover the driver counts the parcels against the manifest. Not spot-checks: counts. Both sign, the driver takes a copy and the office keeps one, and from that moment the parcels on it are the carrier’s responsibility and the copy here is the evidence of when they stopped being ours. A parcel the driver will not take comes off the manifest before either signature goes on it, with the reason written against the line — usually a dimension or a mass outside what that vehicle is carrying that day.

Anything that comes off goes back to the staging lane rather than to the bench. It is already packed, labelled and weighed; what it needs is a different route, which is a desk decision, not a packing one.

  • Before

    The parcels are ours. A fault found here is a walk back to the bench.

  • The count

    Every parcel against every line. Not a spot-check, and not a tally of orders.

  • After

    Both copies signed. From that minute the parcels on the list are the carrier’s.

Right leaf / Dates, and who is entitled to give one

Why no date is quoted here

This site does not promise a delivery date and does not name the carrier a parcel will travel with. Both are properties of one particular parcel: its size, its mass, where it is going and the service chosen when the order was placed. They are quoted at the point of order and repeated on the despatch message for that parcel, where they can be true of it.

A date printed on a page written months earlier is not a commitment, it is a decoration, and the first thing it does is set an expectation that the floor was never asked about. What this leaf will commit to is the sequence: a parcel is not labelled until it is packed and weighed, it is not manifested until it is labelled, and it is not handed over until it has been counted by the person taking it.