We finally figured out what our Random Research Team does for a living!
They run around tiny rural German towns in the wee hours of the morning to deliver newspapers and magazines. During a holiday break in our role as a volunteer hospital shuttle, we took a couple of ladies to their paper route and learned many things.
First of all, the vast majorities of our hillbilly country towns turn off their street lights at night. Which makes for much more work finding the street names and the houses.
Straight streets in German towns? Only in the flatlands way up north, nowhere else.
Add to this that continuity of a street out in the 1000 plus years old villages is not a priority. A street may look straight but change name without rhyme or reason. Or your street continues at an angle, while the continuing straight part is called something else. Or, the street forks and both parts of the fork share the name. In this case, a street sign may or may not - generally, well, not - indicate the numbers found on the respective part of the fork.
99.9% of the street signs out here do not have numbers. Even and odd numbers on the left or the right must be a recent invention. Newer streets have them separated by the side of the street, older streets do not.
Street signs themselves are kind of sparse in the older parts. A single sign at one end of the street is common, and if you arrive at the other end a quarter mile down, the infrastructure won't tell you.
Unlike in the U.S. where plastic wrapped papers fly out of the window of a pick up truck, Germans do not wrap them in plastic and stick them right into the mail box. A mail box which almost never sits next to the street, but is bolted firmly into the wall right at the entrance to the house. Which, in turn, may be up or down steps or a slippery farm access pavement and the like.
No paper maps of these little towns have ever existed. The county road builders or the pink punks of the rebranded telecom company have maps, but not for the paper boys.
The salvation is Google Maps. Enlarge, print, voila! And a really good flashlight.
Google Street view would be perfect. You could find all the buildings on the delivery list in the comfort of your home and get the paper into the right letter box the very first time.
But with many Germans demanding their houses be fuzzed out, Google simply halted the street view project here.
In the pitch dark German countryside at 4 AM, it takes a special kind of delivery person to brave the winter rain and make the perfect breakfast possible for the subscribers.
Get up at 6 AM, sit at the table in a warm, well lit house with a piping hot cup of coffee and the daily paper.
Unseen hands make this happen.
Some of these unseen hands belong to old people who want or need to work, some to recent immigrants with zero knowledge of the language, some to people who don't sleep much anyway and find a hundred or so extra Euros a month welcome extra money for being awake.
They do get six weeks of vacation, just thought I'd tell you Americans...
But - people are people - not all is always well in the realm of the paper elfs. One of the ladies was given end of the year gifts and cards by the replacement who did her route for two weeks over Christmas.
Some Germans, few, keep the old tradition of giving a gift or some money to the service people in their lives, i.e. the postman, the garbage pickup people, the paper people.
The cards were open, the money gone.
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