Just picked up the morning mail, and I notice that two items–our cable bill and our property tax bill–have “Canada” handwritten on the envelope, and some of the barcoding blacked out. Moreover, over top of the red postage metering they received at the local billing offices, they have been franked with a black Portland, Oregon postmark.
We’re not really worried about paying these bills on time–we’re on an automatic pay system with both these creditors, so regardless of when the bills arrive, we know they have been paid. Good thing too, since according to the postage meter, the property tax bill was sent in May. But especially with the property tax bill, which we know was generated and sent from City Hall in Calgary, Alberta; why would these two items end up in Portland? A postal code is not a zip code, Alberta’s abbreviation (AB) could never be confused for Oregon, and the name “Calgary” is definitely not “Portland.”
Probably a rhetorical question, since we’re in MPSIMS, and there may well be no answer except “a screwup at the post office.” But do you have any of your own tales of mail gone strangely awry?
Back when I was a humble lab technician, a mailing about a series of research seminars arrived having gone from Colorado to Philadelphia by way of–according to the markings–Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
There were no diplomatic relations between the US and Vietnam at the time, but it didn’t matter, apparently.
I remember the little glitch when the IRS decided that countries should have 2 character country codes. They set up the requirement & computer companies that made banking software coded to the spec. All tax mailings for bank customers that lived in CAnada went by way of CAlifornia that year. I guess they really should have checked with the USPS to see if CA was already being used for something…
The ISO-3166 country code table has a 2-alpha entry, a 3-alpha entry and a 3-digit entry for every identified political/geographical entity. The 2-alpha for Canada is CA. If a coder is trying to use a standardized system that will be automatically updated when there are changes, they are pretty well locked in to using ISO-3166. (The large customer system I ran for years originally had a 3-digit code, so I was able to simply convert ours to theirs, avoiding the ISO-3166 2-alpha problem.)
On the other hand, USPS regulations state that they want to see the country name spelled out in the address, regardless of however ISO is employed for EDI and related systems. For missing THAT, the programmer should be forced to spend the Christmas break manually changing his own system and correcting all the historical records.