Birthday flowers in Mountain View

A Mountain View birthday order usually names a building before it names a street. This is a badge-reader town: the recipient works behind a turnstile at Google on Amphitheatre Parkway and Charleston Road in 94043, at the Bay View campus on the Moffett side, inside Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus on La Avenida Street, at Intuit on Coast Avenue, at Mozilla on East Evelyn Avenue, at LinkedIn's Mountain View buildings, at Khan Academy, or in one of the mid-size offices stacked along Ellis Street, Middlefield Road and West Evelyn. No courier reaches a desk in any of those buildings. Flowers land at a staffed lobby, a front desk or a mailroom, and somebody inside walks them the rest of the way — which is why the three lines that decide whether a Mountain View office birthday works are the building number, the recipient's team or floor, and a mobile number the front desk can call. Add the badge-holder's name if the recipient is a contractor, because visitor-desk logs are organized by host, not by bouquet.

The residential half of the map is tighter than the campus half and has its own traps. 94040 covers Old Mountain View, Cuesta Park, Waverly Park and the Miramonte and Grant Road stretch toward the Los Altos line — the highest share of single-family porches in the city, house numbers readable from the curb, and the easiest deliveries we route here. 94041 is the downtown core around Castro, Villa, Dana and Bryant Streets and the Caltrain transit center: dense, walk-up, and partly car-free, since the downtown blocks of Castro Street between Villa and Mercy are a pedestrian mall, so a driver parks on a side street and finishes on foot. 94043 runs from Monta Loma, Rex Manor, Sylvan Park and Whisman Station out through North Bayshore to Shoreline. Two ZIPs on the city's list are not deliverable addresses at all: 94039 is post-office boxes, and 94035 is Moffett Field, a federal installation with gate control — an order to a NASA Ames or Moffett address will not clear the gate, so send it to the home instead. And because more than half of Mountain View rents, a large share of birthdays end at a leasing office, a package room or a callbox on El Camino Real, West Middlefield, San Antonio, Evelyn or Whisman. The gate code belongs in the note.