Arthur Figgis wrote:
The colleges each have their own postcodes, though Name, College,
Cambridge is pretty much certain to work (unless there are two people
with the same name there), and there will be a porter to collect
whatever it is. I guess there might be a problem if you are getting a
big heavy thing which needs to be delivered to a very specific place.

Getting the 37kg parcel over the humpback bridge on the river on an unbraked
trolley was fun... it almost fell in. Next time I found out the real
postcode of the building it wanted to go to, even though it had no
facilities to receive post.

The system used to break with firms which couldn't cope with multiple
names at one address, but hopefully that is generally fixed these days -
one electronics firm used to send all orders to whoever had placed the
first ever order from that address, so there would be messages
circulating saying things like "whoever ordered the left-handed grommit
from ACME, it's in my pigeon hole, from Fred Bloggs".

Still happens. Usually the addressee is left off, so things are just
addressed to 'XYZ College', and the porters have to figure which of 600
people it might belong to. Plenty of emails like this still fly around.

Theo