One evening Juan MoTime was out on his sun deck, drinking and thinking, as he often did.  Looking at the stars and the universe made him think great universal thoughts.  Of course, he also thought earthier things like how the milky way and the other spiral galaxies seemed to look a lot like the fungameciums on Woody’s paisley ties.

But then, he’d been drinking.

Out of nowhere, he thought, I wonder what it would be like if I sent a postcard to some other tree on the other side of the universe.  Continuing on, he thought, for example, I wonder how long my return address would be.  This was an interesting concept so he grabbed a pen and a postcard and started writing his full universal address for the first time in his Juan Motime life.

“Lets see,” he thought, “It goes like this.”  I’m Juan Motime at 100 Point Drive in Edwardsville, St. Louis.  I’m in Missouri-Illinois in the U.S.A.

Not bad, so far, he mused.

Then he quickly continued.  I need to write I’m in North America on Planet Earth in the Solar System.  Continuing, he thought, I’m in the Milky Way Galaxy in the Universe.

Quite pleased with himself, and looking over the address, he thought, wow, that wasn’t so bad.  It only takes a ten line address to define where I am in the entire universe.

But, of course, he knew he had to add a proper zip code and extension because the UPS (Universal Postal Service) would not return a card without it.

So he opened up the UPS zip code directory and carefully copied out his fully qualified zip code.
This took some time and when he was done, after his hand stopped cramping, he took a deep breath and counted up the digits.

“Whew,” he said, “my zip code is greater than a googol (a bigass number followed by a hundred zero).”  Counting the fully extended zip code, it was one hundred and eight digits.

After adding a $100 UPS stamp, which Juan thought was quite reasonable for the distance it would be delivered, he stood back, took a long drink off his barley pop and looked the post card over.
It looked quite impressive really, but there was no room left to write anything, even a simple, “Hi, I’m Juan MoTime from the other side of the universe.”

Juan contemplated this fact for a few minutes.  Then he sighed a fairly contented sigh and set the card aside.  He thought, well, that was a fun intellectual exercise, and promptly decided to do nothing with it.
Wandering back into the house, he said, “Hmmm, everyones got to beleaf in something, and I beleaf I’ll have another barley pop.”

And that was the end of Juan’s Universal Post Card experience for the evening.