Strange dates

Postcrossing Help!
1

I’ve just received a card from Russia. The sender wrote on it 10.10.20 but the postmark is 12.12.20 and it arrived today, 25.1.21.

Yet when I registered it, it showed date of sending as 4 September 20!

Assuming that the handwritten 10 October is erroneous, what happened to the card between 4 September, and 12 December when it was postmarked in Russia? (Then it took about six weeks to get here.)

I’m just curious, at least it arrived. :slightly_smiling_face:

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2

Not everyone writes the cards immediately nor send them right away.

ID was requested in September, written in October, mailed in December and received in January.

Maybe the sender got ill or something like that.

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3

Is that a city or rural area somewhere deep away?

4

This is also Russia, not just the big cities.

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5

There’s also the possibility that the sender waited a while to send and then couldn’t due to mail restrictions. Last year I draw an address in Japan and I wanted to get a postcard that matched the receiver’s wishes but after some days I was unable to send it due to restrictions for most of the year. In December the restrictions to Japan ended and then I sent it with a message explaining the delay. Now it’s possible the card isn’t registered due to the long time, but it was already written, so I sent anyway.

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6

The city where this card came from is quite remote and near the Arctic Circle. Maybe it’s simply winter over there. Plus we are still in a global pandemic and the Russian Post is notorious for beeing slow. And the sender mentioned that they are a student. Maybe they had to pass some exams.

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7

It’s not a fully rural area, where post is delivered only in winter by reindeers when rivers got frozen :sweat_smile::grin: It’s medium size 350k+ citizens city, big harbour on Arctic ocean. I checked this user’s two accounts and other active users of same city - all random chosen have same sent statistics, sent in October, postcards arrived in December-January. Seems like postal hiccup of this city, most likely not postcrossers’ fault

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8

It’s not strange at all considering current situation.

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9

Thanks for all the replies. Just to be clear, I wasn’t ‘having a go’ at this person, I was merely curious about the dates.

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10

The dates did seem weird, I even checked my received card in 2020 from this city, but they were sent in June, received in July (even Russia to Russia took about 1 month from this city)

11

Lol, but that is a cute image ^^^

I will add, unhelpful to specific question, but possibly interesting tidbit –
Sometimes I will drop my mail in our “blue boxes” which get picked up from our mailing system typically daily – however, I have noticed that some of them do not get picked up regularly at all. So I will write a date on the card, but then it might sit in those neglected blue boxes for a week or more, and then it gets postmarked with a different date altogether, so that could be a contributing factor to mismatched dates.

An extreme example: in my old neighborhood, we had a blue box where lots of mail was getting trapped inside, the local post office eventually fixed it, but there was some mail that had been trapped inside for over a month.

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12

I have had a couple of weird date postcards like that recently. I think some of them have been held up in quarantine situations but in one case I think the person had just sent me a second or third card. The date stamp on the postcard showed that it was postmarked in December but they drew my name in March. The date on the card from the sender was September. I’m just glad it arrived :slight_smile:

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13

Nothing strange about that.

FIRST DATE: the day you draw the address

SECOND DATE: the day you actually write the postcard, which can be (much) later for several reasons:

  1. you didn’t have the prefect card for the adressee, but knew where to get it - so youb put off writing until you had time to go postcard-shopping
  2. after reading the profile you didn’t really know what to write to that person
  3. something happened in your life that prevented you from writing the card right away
  4. postal services were suddenly suspended due to a pandemic
  5. you name it

THIRD DATE: the day you actually mailed the postcard - which again can be different because:

  1. you wrote the postcard in the evening of the previous day
  2. you wrote the postcard on a weekend when post offices where closed
  3. the weather was crap and you didn’t feel like going out to the post office
  4. you didn’t have the right stamps and were waiting for an online delivery
  5. you were ill at home (or in quarantine) while writing the postcard, and were able to post it only after you got better (you got out of quarantine)
  6. you had some sudden problems in your life that made posting postcard a matter of very low priority
  7. you dropped dead after writing the postcard, and your family were too busy mourning you and organizing your funeral to think abaout mailing your last post :wink:
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If I drop dead, I suspect my family will toss all my postcards in the recycling bin and forget about them :joy: