US/UK web and database developers: not everyone has a zip/post code! (Warning: lame)

[jjimm]

If you're marketing your products to the WHOLE FUCKING WORLD, make your stupid damn database and web interface able to cope with international addresses.

It's very useful to plot the demographics by Zip or postcode. And by standardized phone number. The US and the UK are pretty clever and systematic about your postal addressing. And quite efficient too. But not every country enjoys the benefit of such a system, and furthermore not every country needs it.

Examples of full international addresses:

Mr Chan
10, Main Street
Hong Kong

The O'Reilly family
Wexford
Ireland

They don't fit into a standard format, do they? By all means, set your forms up to handle and classify US/UK addresses correctly, but when you make the form inadmissible because the zip/postal code isn't five numbers in a row/two blocks of numbers and letters, or we don't actually have a state, county, or province, or whatnot, WE CAN'T SUBMIT THE FUCKING FORM. Which means WE CAN'T BUY YOUR PRODUCTS. While I'm at it, the + sign means "code required to dial internationally". This code differs from country to country, so the plus sign is a very efficient way of indicating that you dial whatever your country's international code is. Thus "+353" means "international code + country code for Ireland". If you insist on having your form interface say "please enter area code" expecting only three digits, or your database can't handle anything other than digits, you're never going to be able to call me. Not that I want you to anyway, so maybe it's a good thing.

And if I do manage to get through the stupid forms, I end up with shit addressed to

jjimm
Anyco Ltd.
24 Madeup Street
Dublin 3
Dublin
Ireland
Ireland
00000

Which is not particularly conducive to getting my mail delivered.

Most of the time it's not a problem with the database, it's a problem with the jerk who designed it. Makes me want to slap you all upside the head.

You *slap* stupid *slap* arse biscuits! *slap* *slap *slap*

Note: does not apply to all internationally-oriented US and UK web-based forms. Just most of them.

[TheLoadedDog]

My word.

Sydney, NSW is in Australia.
Sydney, NS is in Canada!

If you web designers are too thick to provide a State/Province field which can handle three characters, then make it a freakin' optional field. Getting rapped over the knuckles electronically with a "Some fields were missing/incomplete (you foreign MORON!)" message pisses me off no end when I'm trying to enter my correct bloody address.

[ruadh]

jjimm, I'm pretty sure that if you sent a letter to "The O'Reilly Family, Wexford, Ireland" the post office wouldn't know what to do with it.

Now "The O'Reilly Family, Bastardstown*, Wexford, Ireland", or something else narrowing it down to which O'Reilly family in Wexford, might get there.

As for the OP, it's usually possible to work around it somehow. My postcode (and yours, I presume) is Dublin 7, so if I have to enter a zip code I usually put 00007; on a UK site I'll put D0 0O7 and it usually works. (I'm not sure how the culchies would work it, maybe just lots of O's and 0's.) I also send a note to the webmaster politely pointing out their mistake.

But, I agree with the sentiment of your post completely. It really is arrogant of these designers not to take the rest of the world into account.

_{*yes, there really is such a place}

[Siege]

jjimm, I was a translator who lived in Japan and wrote to relatives back in England before postal codes were common before I got into database design. That's why when setting up something that requires people enter an address or phone number, unless I'm sure it won't be used outside the United Staates, I allow for that. To me, to do anything less is some combination of lazy, incompetent, and/or unprofessional. Then again, I'm no longer a programmer in title.

It's a sad world when an administrative assistant can outcode a web designer.

CJ

[jjimm]

Originally posted by ruadh
jjimm, I'm pretty sure that if you sent a letter to "The O'Reilly Family, Wexford, Ireland" the post office wouldn't know what to do with it.

Au contraire - this was based on a real-life example (with the name changed to protect the innocent). His is the only "O'Reilly" family in Wexford Town, and mail addressed thus gets to him fine. Probably an anomaly, but a genuine one.

[TheLoadedDog]

If you wrote a letter to my mum at:

Her name
Gooloogong
Australia

..she would receive it. If you omitted the word "Australia" she would still probably recieve it if the letter was posted from a place like the UK, where the letter sorters would be likely to guess it is an Aussie sounding placename.

Just to clarify, it's the only place with that name in Australia. It has a population of only 250, and no mail delivery, so residents need to go to the post office to collect their mail. Heck, I reckon it'd be possible to use her first name only, and with the two words (first name and town), you could get a letter to her from London.

As a postal worker, I have seen lots of cases like this. It is especially common in Australia, the UK, and Ireland.

[jjimm]

Originally posted by TheLoadedDog
Just to clarify, it's the only place with that name in Australia. It has a population of only 250, and no mail delivery, so residents need to go to the post office to collect their mail. Heck, I reckon it'd be possible to use her first name only, and with the two words (first name and town), you could get a letter to her from London.

Sounds like a challenge!

[Collounsbury]

I feel for you brother, I feel for you.

I confess I ... got a bit irate with a customer service representative in the States from a financial institution I deal with on personal issues because she couldn't quite grasp the concept that I have no postal code.

Yes, it is true, no proper postal code (at home). In fact to get to my house (and it is even in, well, a diplomatic neighborhood shall we say) one gives directions. Even postal, it's along the lines of:

Villa X
Neighborhood Y
Nr Corner of [Famous all Xian girls college](*) and [somewhat infamous hotel whose business is somewhat 'daily diplo']
City
Country

I'm afriad this just does not go over well.


(*: I do like my walks back for lunchtime)

[curly chick]

So, how many countries actually have postcodes?
I seem to think that there are very few who don't - maybe just the places you have lived, jjimm!

And yes, while it annoys me to be unable to fill in a foreign form where the postcode field is mandatory, the invention of postcodes is a interesting pastime, allowing you to bin the dross you subsequently get in the post
In fact, I have even used B1N 1T as a postcode.

curly chick
number, road
Dublin 11
B1N 1T
Ireland

The forms which really drive me to violence are the ones with the next level of validation
That is an invalid postcode. Please enter in the correct format

No order for them, then.
Go and have a coffee and a smoke and when the calm descends decide that I didn't really need the whatsit anyway.
€X more money for beer for me.

[ruadh]

Originally posted by jjimm
Au contraire - this was based on a real-life example (with the name changed to protect the innocent). His is the only "O'Reilly" family in Wexford Town, and mail addressed thus gets to him fine. Probably an anomaly, but a genuine one.

Aha, well, the name change makes all the difference there.

I've been able to receive mail that was addressed incorrectly because my name is (by Irish standards) so unusual even in central Dublin that the post office recognise it now. I don't imagine a Catherine O'Connor would have the same luck.

[jjimm]

Originally posted by ruadh
Aha, well, the name change makes all the difference there.

Sorry, I did pick a bad example.

[TheLoadedDog]

Originally posted by jjimm
Sounds like a challenge!

Email me if you feel up to it.

[calm kiwi]

I totaly agree, I usually just add in random numbers and letters till it works. It still makes me GRRRRRRR though.
Like Aus, our posties are fairly on to it. I once lived in a suburb called Takapuna. My brother in-law (in Scotland) adressed his letter to Pakapuna. After trying Papakura first they finally delivered the letter.......all without a postcode

[jjimm]

The other stupid thing is, if they're mining the data and requiring non-US or non-UK style data, they're going to end up with degraded demographics, due to all the people who've filled in "Fuckoffsville, 12345" and the like.

[TheLoadedDog]

calm kiwi, you're right there. In Australia, we have many multiple occurences of the same placename, and for uncoded mail, you'll see a postal worker has written:

Try:
NSW 2134
VIC 3127
etc
etc

..and the sorters in each incorrect state will cross out theirs, and send it to the next one.

New Zealand has a weird postcode system though. Seems everywhere has a code, but they are rarely used. Just Kiwis being cool again...

I just use 90210 for US sites that insist on a five digit "zip". They must really get sick of that.

[TheLoadedDog]

Actually, you lot might appreciate the work of this bloke in South Australia. His address includes such things as "Shout 'trousers!' when delivering this, or mother will get angry and start shooting!" It's in the vein of the more well-known US Postal Experiments (which has been doing the online rounds for a few years), but with an Aussie bent, and using text rather than weird objects.

Definitely worth a look. The US one is a laugh too, if you've never seen it.

[Una Persson]

This is a HUGE problem in some of the home-grown CRM software that I've been called in to consult on. Typically, the problem lies with a company with too much money setting a specification for recording a person's info in the database as:

Name
Address
Phone
e-mail
Fax

And then this is turned over to 18-22 year-old vo-tech students who, although often sharp people, have very limited experience in actual programming or in life in general.

On the programming standpoint, CRM software is often considered a "thankless, boring, and mind-scramblingly repetitive task", and thus gets turned over to the "grunt" programmers. People who are typically of low experience level in writing fault-tolerant and easily extensible and flexible applications.

On the personal standpoint, very few of the CRM developers I've met have ever been outside of the US, or if they have it's because they are Indian. So, as you can imagine, you see the following sorts of things:

* Not enough entires for complicated addresses.
* Name fields that are woefully too short.
* Postal code fields that only take numbers.
* Phone number fields sans country code.

Hell, I've even seen a major CRM system that was designed for a multinational firm which had more than 30,000 contacts entered into it, none of which had a country entered with them, because someone forgot to add that field, and the admin assistants they hired to type in 30,000 names just started putting anyone outside of the US in the State of "Alaska" (via the "State" drop-down), and putting their actual country in the street address - sometimes.! I took one look at it, and said "Guys? I'm impressed - of your 30,000 plus contacts, more than 20,000 of them are in Alaska alone. You must freaking *rule* the business in that State."

Of course, no records were kept, and so many of the actual countries for these people were lost. And, nearly 18 months later, they *still* haven't added "Country" to the database, because somehow that "created instability in their web server", and no one could figure it out.

Seriously? Can you imagine that? This is a paraphrase of an actual conversation in front of me, when I was investigating it: "Hey, Alice, how many sales contacts do we have in Nigeria?" "Well, Bob, looking through the list of 'Alaska' entires, I see...well, this name might be Nigerian."

"It could be eskimo too." (sorry for using the non-politically correct name, I'm trying to repeat the conversation as closely as possible)

"Maybe. But this city...I think it's in Nigeria. Just Google them...and this person lives on 'England' street. That could mean they live in England."

Lame rant? Not when jobs depend on it.

[jjimm]

Anthracite, sounds like we worked for similar organizations: I worked for one of the world's first online retail trading portals (amazingly, they managed to predict the future and become a dot-com bankruptcy 3 years before everyone else managed it!). Most of the manufacturers were in China and the Middle East. Most of the purchasers were in the US and Europe. The thing relied on being internationalized.

The database was designed by a senior ex-Very Big Company database developer and his team. They'd put it together: without enough fields for complex addresses; with only 9 digits allowed for phone numbers; with "State" mandatory for all countries, but a list comprising only US states. One good thing he'd done was that it cleverly inserted the international dialling code in front of the phone number, based on the country chosen. Except there wasn't the full complement of the world's countries in the database, and he'd structured the primary keys so we couldn't add any more. And when you ran reports on the thing, it didn't include the phone country code because he didn't realise that you had to dial it to call overseas. He thought everything began with "1" because that was how you dialled to another area in the US.

[matt_mcl]

Usually, I just give up in cases like this. In one recent case, though (there was a country field, but I can't put in my province...grrrrrr!), it was this really cool lesbian publishing house that I really wanted some Dykes to Watch Out For books from. So I submitted my order anyway, and then sent them a nice little note about why their form should be changed. They were gratifyingly contrite and the form was changed within the day. (The really stupid thing was that the web developer was Canadian... )

[matt_mcl]

You know, sometimes even something as simple as "rue Saint-Whoever ouest" will throw them. If I'm dealing with someone over the phone from an English-speaking area, I usually just give it as "Saint Whoever Street West" for simplicity's sake. Not strictly accurate, but it'll get there.

(I was a little surprised to have to spell out "Quebec" for the clerk in Britain the other day, though.)

I really enjoy international addresses that sound interesting. like Soandso, Eggplant Manors, down the hill from the old cemetery, Mailbag Eight, Piffitypuffity Twp., (country), or what have you.

[ruadh]

I used to work in property law here in Ireland and some of the addresses were absolute nightmares - particularly when you included the full description as given on all the deeds going back a couple hundred years. "A formerly known as B situate in the Townland of C, Barony of D and County E now known as 10 F Street, G."

And usually E (and possibly G) are the only ones you can spell without assistance.

[Ice Wolf]

Originally posted by TheLoadedDog

New Zealand has a weird postcode system though. Seems everywhere has a code, but they are rarely used. Just Kiwis being cool again...

Actually, TLD, NZ Post states in most of their literature that the postcodes are only necessary in NZ for bulk mailout purposes, not really for standard mail. I use mine anyway, because I grew up in an era where every letter in Auckland had a code, just a single or two digit number. Now it's 4. Progress, eh?

[TheLoadedDog]

Geez Wolfie, can't a bloke flirt mildly with Calm Kiwi in peace?

---or in other words---

I didn't **REALLY** think Kiwis were cool...



Well, maybe...

[Ice Wolf]

Jus' gettin' the facts straight, mate. That's what we're here for.

[TheLoadedDog]

Got Kiwi women winkin' at me?

Check.

WOAH. That's the stuff...

My work here is done....

[asterion]

Originally posted by ruadh
I used to work in property law here in Ireland and some of the addresses were absolute nightmares - particularly when you included the full description as given on all the deeds going back a couple hundred years. "A formerly known as B situate in the Townland of C, Barony of D and County E now known as 10 F Street, G."

And usually E (and possibly G) are the only ones you can spell without assistance.

Oh, that's nothing. You should see the property law in New Mexico. And here's why:

In the 16th and 17th century, mostly, the Spanish government issued royal land grants. Eventually, when Mexico got independence, that government promised to uphold the original land grants. When the US got the area including New Mexico after the Mexican War, the US government promised to uphold the original land grants.

So, if you really need to track the ownership of a property, sometimes you have to go all the way back several centuries into another language.

I'm sure this is probably true in at least California, Arizona, and Texas, as well.

[ruadh]

Um, some of the documents here are in another language too (Irish).

[sailor]

This rant comes at a good time. I was just now trying to fill out a form at Priceline and I get this. I have reviewed everything several times but I keep getting the same thing. The least they could do is tell you *what* field does not parse. Screw them. I'm going somewhere else.

[TwistofFate]

I'm not going to mention the website, but it really should have known better. It had 35 available counties to pick from in Ireland (we'd be happy with 32, but thats another issue ) including "Shannon".

It now still insists on entering a zip code.

[jjimm]

Oh, and if you want to look at a map of Dublin on the Yahoo! map site, you have to choose "UK". Furthermore, Yahoo! issues Irish people with @yahoo.co.uk addresses instead of @yahoo.ie ones.

Not strictly relevant, but still...

[tomndebb]

It really is arrogant of these designers not to take the rest of the world into account.

You misspelled ignorant.

There is, of course, the insular nature of American business that tends to interfere with knowledge of the rest of the world, but most of it is simply the decision by corporations to jump into new software with both feet, then run out and hire lots of young, cheap labor to maintain it. These kids can all do wonderful things normalizing data and sending streams around the world, but most of them do not know how to find their own home town on a map of the U.S.

In a little bit of their defense, I will point out that I was trying to help a couple of them set up a customer DB for a company with a lot of foreign sales and it was a nightmare. We initially tried to actually map the database to the data so that future generations would have reliable information when they went gathering statistics. We wound up with a U.S. model, a Commonwealth model, and a generic model (where every field other than the name and the country were free-form text). The professional mailing companies had 35 separate models, and we knew from experience with actual customers in several of the countries that the professional models were wrong (or, at least, that those countries had multiple acceptable forms and our customers preferred models that differed from the models offered).

The other issue is that many companies are just entering the international market and they have no experience in-house to handle the new stuff. I once had to go through a database changing all the German and Austrian addresses from Strabe to Strasse. The clerk taking the hand-written addresses sent her was simply unaware of what she was reading.

[Eva Luna]

I feel your pain. Immigration forms are even more fun, not to mention the various government and private databases that track the bureaucratic progress of those forms. When you figure out the postal code thing, wanna come over here and design a U.S. immigration forms package, with Lotus Notes interface, that can deal with all the wacky international address and personal name formats and isn’t also a pile of crap? My firm would be eternally grateful.

Eva Luna, Immigration Paralegal, stuck here trying to fit what seems to be a 20-part Brazilian family name into an 10-character box obviously designed by Anglo-Saxons who have never left the Midwest (and you’d think that Fedex, at least, would be used to dealing with this sort of thing!)

[ruadh]

Originally posted by jjimm
Furthermore, Yahoo! issues Irish people with @yahoo.co.uk addresses instead of @yahoo.ie ones.

I have a yahoo.ie address.

[Eva Luna]

Originally posted by ruadh
I have a yahoo.ie address.

Maybe Yahoo issues users in Northern Ireland with .uk addresses, and those in the Irish Republic with .ie addresses? The U.S. handles things similarly from a diplomatic standpoint; I once tried to schedule a final green card appointment in London for a guy from Belfast, but who had an Irish rather than a U.K. passport. London wouldn’t take jurisdiction on the reasoning that he didn’t consider himself a U.K. citizen, by virtue of the fact that he bore an Irish passport, and the U.S. Embassy in Dublin wouldn’t take him, because in the U.S. government view he’d been born in the U.K. We finally gave up on sorting out matters of international diplomacy by sending him to Sydney; as his last foreign residence had been in Australia, that was the only post that had to accept him, exercise of discretion or no.

(Have I mentioned lately how much I love my job?)

[NinjaChick]

Feh. Try having a last name with a hyphen. Can't count the number of freakin' times I've gotten an error: "The name field may only contain letters of the English language" or something like that. Led to a freakin' 2-hour phone call trying to get the nice folks at the ETS to correct my SAT registration. Same thing happened with the ACT.

Grrrrr.

[ruadh]

Originally posted by Eva Luna
Maybe Yahoo issues users in Northern Ireland with .uk addresses, and those in the Irish Republic with .ie addresses?

It probably does, although as jjimm and I live in the same neighbourhood (which neither crosses nor indeed sits anywhere near the border ), it wouldn't explain why I could get a .ie address and he couldn't.

The U.S. handles things similarly from a diplomatic standpoint; I once tried to schedule a final green card appointment in London for a guy from Belfast, but who had an Irish rather than a U.K. passport. London wouldn’t take jurisdiction on the reasoning that he didn’t consider himself a U.K. citizen, by virtue of the fact that he bore an Irish passport, and the U.S. Embassy in Dublin wouldn’t take him, because in the U.S. government view he’d been born in the U.K. We finally gave up on sorting out matters of international diplomacy by sending him to Sydney; as his last foreign residence had been in Australia, that was the only post that had to accept him, exercise of discretion or no.

(Have I mentioned lately how much I love my job?)

Having once done your job, I empathise completely.

Of course, all the above is also complicated by the fact that the U.S. views the Six Counties as part of Ireland rather than part of the U.K. for the purposes of the Diversity Visa. I'm sure the nordies have Bruce Morrison to thank for that.

[calm kiwi]

Originally posted by Ice Wolf
Actually, TLD, NZ Post states in most of their literature that the postcodes are only necessary in NZ for bulk mailout purposes, not really for standard mail. I use mine anyway, because I grew up in an era where every letter in Auckland had a code, just a single or two digit number. Now it's 4. Progress, eh?

We have 4 didgits now? Who knew! I'm still using the single 9 if I use anything at all.


Oh and a wink for TheLoadedDog

[calm kiwi]

Well that certainly was a novel way to spell digit.......oops

[jjimm]

Originally posted by tomndebb
You misspelled ignorant.

You misspelled "so breathtakingly ignorant that they need a slap round the fucking head with an atlas".

[Ice Wolf]

Originally posted by calm kiwi
We have 4 didgits now? Who knew! I'm still using the single 9 if I use anything at all.

Yeah. Take mine for example. Where I live, it was Auckland 7, and now it's Auckland 1007. Yours would be similar, calm kiwi.

Heh. So Aussies get all excited over winking, huh? Heh, heh, heh.

Oi, TLD?

[calm kiwi]

Originally posted by Ice Wolf


Heh. So Aussies get all excited over winking, huh? Heh, heh, heh.

Well we have to be kind to those Ockers after the netball and rugby eh.

[jjimm]

Isn't "winking" a word for masturbation, said with a Kiwi accent?

[calm kiwi]

No jjimm you have been misinformed. Aussies are winkers not kiwis.

(awww I love em really )

[Pergau]

This is slightly off topic, but our office in the IFSC (international Financila Services Centre) of Dublin received a letter addressed to the "Eye of the sea"

So our postmen are not only cool but they are poets too.

[TheLoadedDog]

Wolfie, I thought you meant yer postcode was Auckland 4.

Thinks for the wunks.

[Ice Wolf]

Originally posted by TheLoadedDog
Wolfie, I thought you meant yer postcode was Auckland 4.

Thinks for the wunks.

I'd be somewhere a tad more upmarket, if that were th' case. And it'd be 1970 all over again.

And you're welcome.

[TheLoadedDog]

Originally posted by ruadh
It probably does, although as jjimm and I live in the same neighbourhood (which neither crosses nor indeed sits anywhere near the border ), it wouldn't explain why I could get a .ie address and he couldn't.

Put it down to Yahoo weirdness. From 16 000 miles away, I have a .uk yahoo junk email. I don't really mind, but I did specify I live in Australia, and it insisted on giving me the .uk one. I tried to get around this by going back and re-doing parts of the online form, but nope. It was .uk or nothing for me as far as they were concerned.

[jjimm]

I think it must have been some kind of Yahoo! glitch that lasted a few months and was then corrected. I know a few Irish people with yahoo.co.uk addresses because that's all they could get at the time.

Anyway, I stand by the map thing.

[StarvingButStrong]

Actually, some form designers manage to screw even Americans with utterly routine addresses. How? I *think* there must be some difference in requiring a field to be numeric vs. requiring it to be a number. As in, I have on three occasions run into this little routine:

ME: enters address, hits submit

FORM: Invalid address! The zip code must be five digits.

ME: whoops, did I mistype? re-enters zip code, hits submit

FORM: Invalid address! The zip code must be five digits.

ME: Try a third time, punching each of the five numbers slowly and carefully, hits submit

FORM: Invalid address! The zip code must be five digits.

<sign> The first time it happened, it took me a long time to figure out what happens. You see, my zip code starts with a zero. So your clever form sucks it in, applies the 'rule' that leading zeros don't count in numbers, thus converting it to a four digit zip code, and then gripes!

As in, this particular company is now unable to accept orders from most of the New England states...maybe 1/5 of the entire US population! Way to go, form designer!


<sigh> I usually end up putting in a '9' for the zero, figuring it is far enough wrong that maybe some postie will notice the state/zip mismatch and still deliver it.

[jjimm]

Try registering at gettyimages.com (the form that finally pushed me over the edge to write this).