Fun with Apartments

[bhskittykatt]

Got a new subscriber on my paper route today. His apartment number is 201. His neighbor's apartment number is 208. Oddly enough, this is mild compared to many other apartment complexes in the neighborhood. I got to thinking about some of the f*cknuttery that I've seen with apartments that I've had the dubious pleasure of delivering to. Here are the three worst in my neighborhood:

From the people who brought you Wayside School...

I had to deliver to #4 in a 3-story building. Logic would dictate that the lower number apartments would be on the bottom, no? As it turned out, #'s 11 and 12 were on the first floor... 1-5 were on the third floor.

Labyrinth

This particular complex, rather than neatly laid-out corridors and hallways, is a twisty maze of chaos. First, you need to make sure you're in the right building, and the only place the building number is written is on the utility meters, which for some reason are deep within the heart of the first floor (vs. being on the side of the building, where a sane person would put them).

Compounding the difficulties of finding the proper apartment is the fact that the doors are at the ends of narrow, poorly lit hallways, and there are no signs off of the main arterials to tell you what's down there (though some merciful tenants have used sharpies by the main corridors to provide some direction).

Furthermore, the third floor is split so that if you end up on the wrong side, you have to work your way back to the second floor, attempt to navigate the serpentine corridors, and hope you come back out on the right side. I swear, the worst buildings at the University were never this bad.

And the worst: The apartments 23rd st forgot

To further appreciate this a**hattery, first I must explain how to even find this place. It's address indicates the building is located on the 900 block of 23rd St, however once you reach the end of the 1000 block, you'll quickly discover that there is no 900 block.

But wait! You see the brick building you're in front of? If you drive behind said building, you'll be in their parking lot. At the back of their parking lot is some landscaping, and if you observe it closely, you will discover a drive that leads to another parking lot, and a building. This is the 900 block of 23rd St. There is no way to intuitively figure this out from the main road (I was fortunately shown this building by the person who trained me, who learned it from the person who trained them, who learned it from their trainer. Who knows who the poor soul who first had to figure it out was).

You won't know it yet, though, because there are no building numbers. The building, mailboxes, and even your faithful last-ditch resort, the utility meters, are all devoid of numbering. You know you're in the right place, though, because when you look at the apartment numbers, you'll see this:

First floor: 18, 19
Second floor: 23, 24
Third floor: 27, 28

Say it with me now:

As it turns out, on other streets there are more buildings. The first floor starts at some number (the lowest I've found is 13), and the numbers stretch around all the buildings. When they run out, they start again on the second floor of the first building, and so on. There are four or five different buildings scattered around a two-block radius, with other apartment buildings in between. Yeah, it's a royally screwed up numbering system.

Bonus College Sighting

My last year at our community college, I was excited to be having a class in the new science building. I needed to find room 205, so I went down the corridor.

201...202...203...204...207....208...wait, what?!?

I went up and down, down and up the corridor, and could not find the elusive Room 205. I met up with some other lost peers, and we determined that we were indeed classmates seeking the same room, so we banded together and set off on our epic quest.

208...207...204...203...202...

Eventually we reached 201 and the stairs. Despairing, we were about to give up, when we noticed a small hall off to the side.

206...205!

Victory was ours!

As if Fate wanted to rub it in my face, every quarter that year I had at least one class in either rooms 205 or 206 in that building...Winter quarter I even had classes in both.

[Javarod]

Heh, you've gotta love address weirdness. Over the years i've seen a street in Wanamassa where the numbers are random. Really, if you had all evens on one side for example, but not in order, then what had happened was that the land was parted up over the decades, resulting in out of sync numbers. This street though, you had a mixture of even and odd numbers on one side of the street, and the only thing that made the other side better was that there was far fewer houses.

Here on my magazine route, i've a hardware store in Black Canyon City who's address is out of sync. After staring at it for a while, i realized that at some point two digits got transposed, turning 35240 into 35420.

[Magpie]

Someone decided to put in a bunch of condos. They are set up like townhouses, except that there's three units per house. Like normal, you turn off the main road into a driveway/series of roads. The normal way to do this is to

a) have a street number for the complex and then unit numbers for everything else
b) name the "driveways" and then number each building and each unit

instead they chose to give each of the buildings a street number on the main street, and then number the units. Not only can you never find the place without being given directions ("Finch doesn't have a 3400"), but finding the right building is somewhat a matter of luck.

[Aethian]

I remember helping a paper guy find a new house that was added to his route. It was behind the main house, and off to the side of the second house behind the main house. So it was a house, behind two house, behind a house.

The only way I knew how to find the house to deliver the mail? The regular carrier left a hand drawn map in the case.

[rvdammit]

I can understand the Labrynth, if its effectively several buildings put up over time.

[bhskittykatt]

I can understand the Labrynth, if its effectively several buildings put up over time.

Except it isn't...I remember when it was built and it was all one construction. As I said, the buildings at the University (which have been added to again and again over the decades) don't seem to be as bad as these apartments!

[dalesys]

Pick a number...

Any number...

Bingo!

[Argabarga]

I've run into my fair share of address irregularities too on my job, I feel for you.

Especially when a building ends up entombed in the middle of a very large block as other structures are added around it and since it doesn't acutally TOUCH any of the surrounding streets, the street address it has is more-or-less arbitrary and you can't find it unless someone who already knows where it is shows it to you....

Especialy common when you're dealing with a block of old farmhouses that are yards off the street, (as when they were built, that was the road, and the front yard was a field, and now a row of newer buildings are occupying those spaces.)

And, I too have to deal with an odd case where the house numbers on one particular block go in order "447, 445, 443, 449, 441" and this is NOT an error, this is CORRECT based on the way the lots are laid out and and thus cannot be "fixed" because it's not broken.

Another "you'll never figure it out until you see it" situation

[Midorikawa]

My condo park I live in is somewhat wtfified (yes. it's a word. it's in my dictionary at least. You need a newer model. :-P)

First thing to realize when you get to the condo park I live in is that building numbers are meaningless. There's 15 buildings, give or take, and the unit numbers in no way shape or form follow the logical pattern of building 1 is 101-108 and so on. Building 1 has numbers 203-211, building 2 has 257, 260, 262, 263, 265, 267, 268 and 270. buildings 3 and 4 make up the gaps in numbers, and then some. it's all a jumbled mess, and impossible to direct people to where to find me. The building number isn't used in the mailing address at all, and the only thing that shows you where to go is the sign up front that only lists building numbers, not unit numbers.

I've resorted to giving people the directions "turn left at the pool house, go over the drainage ditch of doom, and take the first left, I'll be on the first building on the right."

When I was looking at houses, the realtor had a time finding it, and I had a time finding it to get moved in. It took the moving company 45 minutes to find the place, since the road to it isn't exactly straight forward either. You have to just basically KNOW to drive down the road between a shopping center and a gas station.

[Dave1982]

When I was at college, there was this one oddball classroom location that would always throw people the first time they saw it. I don't remember the room number, but the building code was FOB, for Faculty Office Building.

First of all, a class in the faculty office building?

Second, find the FOB. It's actually OUTSIDE the main entrance "wall" between the quad and the main parking lot. Unless you come in from the Law School entrance, it's the first building you see when visiting the campus, and is the oldest and most run down. It's actually rather embarassing compared the rest of the buildings. It looks like it dates from the late 40s/early 50s, and the inside isn't much better (I swear the security alarms in that building still used foiled glass). But it's not marked as the Faculty Office Building. There's a sign for the Registrar's Office, and another for the Campus Copy Center.

So you finally find the building and go in. The registrar's office is there, and ahead of you is a dog-legged corridor lined on both sides with offices. To the left is a staircase heading down, with a sign that says "Campus Copy." Attempting to find that room number on the ground floor is futile. You have to know to go downstairs, then go all the way PAST the copy center, take a left, do down to the end of THAT hallway (which was NEVER properly lit during my entire 4 years there, which made it look like it was a dead end), and then go through an unmarked door on the right guarded by a pushbutton combination lock. If you manage you manage to find this elusive door AND get in, you'll have found this mystery classroom, which is actually a computer lab where networking and programming courses are taught.

Quite a little quest.

[Imogene]

unmarked door on the right guarded by a pushbutton combination lock

Better than two guards, one who always speaks the truth, and one who always lies. Trust me. Push buttons are easy compared to that, unless it's your first day and no one bothered to tell you the combination...so you knocked while people were on their break, and the door was closed, and the lady who answered blames you for not knowing the combination...? Then it's insanity to have a push button combination lock.

[PepperElf]

some of the streets where my family lives are a little like that. the street numbers start over again each time it goes through a new town.

so 2345 on street x could be 2345 on St.X in Town A
or it could be 2345 on St. X in town B...

[Magpie]

some of the streets where my family lives are a little like that. the street numbers start over again each time it goes through a new town.

We have a couple of streets here in the two cities that cross three/four times (depends how you count it, and how picky you are about city limits). And they have north, south, east and west portions.

[Javarod]

some of the streets where my family lives are a little like that. the street numbers start over again each time it goes through a new town.

so 2345 on street x could be 2345 on St.X in Town A
or it could be 2345 on St. X in town B...

Laughs, "You here in the valley of the sun too? Its worse out in the west valley where old construction uses the town grid, new uses county, plus the main drag runs east west, diagonally south-north, then resumes east-west direction, leaving you with four numbering grids within a mile."

[elsporko]

I had a coworker get lost trying to find a location on 4th street. Turns out that town has two 4th streets.

Another town around here seems like it is well organized. Streets go east to west avenues north to south and the names are all numbers. Works well until you are going to the corner of 23rd street and 11th avenue, or was that 11th street 23rd avenue? Oh well, time to drive around for half an hour figuring it out.