[xp84]

This would work with only humans involved, but nearly everybody runs addresses through standardization now, and they would reject all of those as an incorrect address and usually require the user to enter a conforming one, including the (otherwise very clever) apartment number hack.

This is the same thing that continuously requires me to use my "ZIP+4" for absolutely everything, even though as far as i can tell, there is zero point in ever using it unless one is literally doing metered US Mail.

[dheera]

The trick is if your address is unreadable by the standardizers it gets printed as-is and it ends up with humans processing it.

If you write "885 Foo St. (blue house)" it will get standardized to "885 Foo St."

If you write "Blue house on Foo St. (eight eight five)" the standardizers will choke and it will be printed as-is.

[xp84]

I'm sure that sometimes happens successfully as you describe, but having worked in ecommerce for a long time, many larger retailers will throw addresses like that either back at the customer until they "fix it" or to a queue where customer service will attempt to "fix it" including by calling you. The carriers (like FedEx etc.) really like standardized addresses. So this could result in delays in getting your order.