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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

Like many office buildings in NYC, my employer's building had a system of air-pressured mail tubes. I understand (now) that they are kept in some cases as decoration, historical artifact, or due to the building being designated a historical monument (not sure if internals are covered (?).

We didn't understand that as first, and several colleagues and I put postcards and some expense reports into them. I can see the postcard arriving 100 years later!

This was Accenture, and at the time, original receipts were required. Luckily they made an exception on photocopied receipts when I explained what had happened.

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There was also a discussion of mail chutes in old buildings a while ago, and many suffered from blockages (or being non-operational, as in your case). I could see someone finally clearing out a blockage during a renovation, then dropping the old letters in the mail. But the original article was a card written between families, so probably not in an office building. The flea-market theory from the article seems the most plausible.

I've lived in several apartment buildings that had a mail chute, from the top floor to the first floor, next to the elevator. I don't know how often it was checked for blockage; I think the USPS just picked up the mail form the box at the bottom of the chute.

Two of my offices have had these and at both, we've had engineers constructing insane devices to retrieve things they dropped in :)

Do you know where the mail tubes sent your postcards and expense reports? Did they end up in some basement or were they lost in the tubes forever?

Not sure, but I was told that traditionally they had air pressure pushing them along. But that without air, they get stuck not far from where you dropped them. We were on the 17th floor IIRC, so i imagine they are stuck somewhere close below.

I've seen some of those tubes at a Carrefour or Mercadona supermarket back in 2005 or something, in Spain. When they had too much many at the cash register, they sent the money to their backoffice. Super cool!

Nowadays in Germany they just take the cash register part with the money out and walk to the Tresor room, or have sort of wallets and a colleague delivers the money to there. Example taken from a Kaufland.

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