Strangest postcard story

Postcards & Mail Postcard chat!
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Let me share with you my strangest postcard story so far:

I once received a postcard I had sent from abroad to a friend who lives in my neighbourhood in Cairo. The card didn’t have my address on it :slight_smile:

I guess the postman got used to me being the only person in his area of responsibility who received cards, to the extent that he, upon seeing a card, assumed it must be addressed to me, without even trying to read the address.

I ended up handing it to my friend myself.

Egypt once had a thriving philatelist community, that’s long gone, as can be witnessed here PostCrossing. Now, the postal service deteriorated to the extent that postcards are usually deemed not worth of delivery. Even when people still exchanged mail, before modern communications decimated that, one usually had to maintain a personal relationship with the postmen, supported by generous monetary tipping, if they wanted to guarantee receipt of their mail.

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A few months ago I got a large envelope :email: from the police station at the airport Wien-Schwechat (Vienna International Airport). Uhm :face_with_raised_eyebrow:, … a letter from the police? I was quite surprised and worried. A little excited, I opened the envelope. Inside there was an official message… and a Postcrossing card from the USA! :us:
The message said, that the police opened a locker of a person who was accused, together with others, for burglary. In the locker they found stolen and opened letters and mail, and so on… They found a card addressed to me, and redirected it inside the mentioned envelope.
The police wanted to know if I had loss of letters or something sent with them, I should tell them about it. I filled out the added form, told them that all is okay and that I don’t miss anything, and sent the form back.
So, after all this trouble, a card from the USA reached me without any damage, mailed into an envelope of the police :laughing:. I registered the card, informed the sender about the dramatic journey and why the card was delayed. Then I enjoyed the nice view card, the stamps, the stickers and the nice message :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:.

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Oh! That’s a strange one indeed.
How long ago was the card sent? Maybe there’s still hope for all those missing cards.
When cards increasingly got missing, back in Egypt, I started to imagine a character I called The Great Collector, a grey and wrinkled old employee of the postal service who now then kept a card for himself in a secret collection.