As I've posted before, something went awry when Fedex delivered the N810 I ordered. It never arrived.

After a week, I persuaded LetsTalk to have Fedex reimburse them for the lost package. They did, and a replacement N810 got here Tuesday afternoon.

This morning, a neighbor from another street dropped off the original and merely mis-delivered package. Like Tuesday's, this was an unassuming brown cardboard box about 11"x11"x9" with nothing blaring "Fabulous electronics inside!" to alert the unwary (and only a 10-point-type return address indicating the shipper).

So eleven days after receipt, my oblivious neighbors opened the package and only then realized it wasn't some low-priority content intended for them, but someone else's darling toy.

(Well, that's what it looks like. I've already been asked by one stranger if my N810 is an iPhone.)

So now I've got to arrange this baby's return.

Makes me wonder — wouldn't it be frustration-removing if somehow the shipping could have involved GPS, with a specific location identified as the drop-off spot? Then I (or the diligent shipping researcher) could have quickly retraced the errant deliveryman's steps and retrieved the original package on day one.

For that matter, how come we don't have central GPS reference points that would help locate places? You know, like "the Empire State Building is at 34th and Fifth, and you go up fifty blocks to get to the Met" only in GPS terms?

I'll tell you why, it's because the numbers are technology- and not people-friendly: "The Met is at latitude 40.776073 and longitude -73.964338 and the ESB at latitude 40.75319, longitude -73.985646" has too many numbers to allow us to get a handle on the locations.

You know, I already have 1-866-59NOKIA permanently etched in my memory. (That's the LetsTalk phone number.) And 1-800-GOFEDEX. See where I'm going here?

The whole web experience is built upon the understanding that internettablettalk.com is way easier to remember than 74.86.202.247.

At one end, we've got street addresses, at the other latitude and longitude. What we really need is a friendly GPS, something in the middle that has a logical structure to it and a way to make the key pieces stand out without renaming 34th Street "40.750 Way". Or wait, maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe the Empire State Building does need to be rebranded "750 Empire State" so its universal locator number is part of its identity. After all, I know how to locate "1010 WINS News" on the radio because its frequency is part of the brandname.

Then maybe my house would be located by being +50N and -17W from Montclair's Central Location Referent (the CLeaR point), and even that Fedex deliveryman wouldn't have left my package at +51N-12W without worrying about whether mine was the house next to the blue house or not.

Originally Posted by msaunby

So I take it that in the US you don't have a simplified geo-referencing system like the UK Ordnance Survey's National Grid coordinates? UK aware mapping software generally understands this. e.g. type TQ290796 into www.multimap.com or go to any other place (or palace) in the UK and the Grid Reference is displayed. The digits are metres so locations are accurate to 100 metres, but more can be used if needed.