A man has been left stunned after a letter arrived at his door, which was supposed to be delivered more than 10,000 miles away to an address in Australia.
When Keith Georgiou of Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, collected the letter, he realized it should have been sent to an address in Penrith, New South Wales.
To add to the confusion, the Australian state had been abbreviated to NSW, meaning only one word on the envelope matched Mr Georgiou’s address.
Royal Mail said errors were rare but did happen.
“How it ended up in Penarth instead of Australia is a joke, isn’t it,” the 60-year-old said.
Mr Georgiou saw the letter this weekend and could tell from the envelope that it had been sent from the Exeter area.
“It’s obviously gone through a number of sorting offices and no one has picked it up,” he said.
‘It’s got an airmail sticker on it, everything checks out, and it ends up in South Wales. It didn’t even go to Penrith. [in Cumbria].”
Surprisingly, it is not the first time Mr Georgiou has received a letter that was supposed to go to Australia, but he said this week’s discovery was ironic given the news of the Royal Mail takeover and the fact that the company recently has been fined £10.5 million for missing the post. delivery targets.
“Even the mailman who delivered it to the house, you would think he would have gone ‘wait a minute,’” he said.
‘It’s just not the same address. It’s sad that it’s gotten to this point.’
Mr Georgiou has now reposted the letter after writing a note informing Royal Mail of the error.
“Hopefully it won’t come back here again!” he said.
Royal Mail said: “We are delivering up to 35 million letters a day in December and occasionally errors happen.
“It appears that on this occasion a letter addressed to Penrith was incorrectly read as Penarth… Normally any errors made by mail sorting machines are picked up by our team, but rarely are they not caught in time.”
