Entirely for t_c_da

[shadesofmauve]

I just read westrider's journal and saw this:

"The company we subcontract our actual advertising mailings to seems to be having trouble with the concept of New Zealand."

...and thought you might appreciate that. :)

Comments

[t-c-da.livejournal.com]

having trouble with the concept of New Zealand

Along with most of the "civilized" world, much of whom think we are a little island just of the coast of that Great Unwashed South Land (Australia), which we sort of are, like Hawaii is just off the coast of Oregon/Washington, it being a 3:20:00 flight from Wellington/Christchurch.nz to Melbourne.au (the two closest cities in each country). (It's marginally quicker to fly to Auckland from Sydney than it is to fly to Perth, by about 10 minutes - both trips are about 3.5 hours in a jumbo)

We're also economically insignificant wrt the Centre of The World (aka USA), except that our currency is, I believe, the most traded currency on the planet which makes it's value relative to other more stable currencies (e.g. USD, UKP, EUR) highly erratic being subject to the whims of currency traders and currency speculators, which doesn't help us or our manufacturers much...

When we announced in England that we were moving to NZ, our friends mostly commented along the lines of "well, at least you'll be closer to home (Adelaide.sa.au)", to which we pointed out that we were at that point closer to Moscow than we would be to home after the move, to the accompaniment of dropped jaws...


ermm, yeah, that set off a longish ramble about Kiwi inferiority, didn't it?

[shadesofmauve]

LOL, well, I did kind of bait you into it... :P

The subject of his post was "But I've shipped things there! IT EXISTS!"

Funny how we perceive distance and development in places we've never been. When I went to visit E's family on the east coast I thought for sure we could go more places because the states are so small that everything's closer together, but they more than make up for it by having impassable traffic. When I was in the UK, I had two different elderly English gents imply not-too-subtly that they were pretty certain I lived in the wild west and rode a pony to school (One said "Seattle, I forget... is that near red indian country?" And I was stunned into silence).

[t-c-da.livejournal.com]

yeah, we have to bend our addresses considerably to get past some US websites address verifiers - we don't have states/counties/provinces and we have 4 digit postcodes.

My eldest son, when living in Melbourne, used to have fun with his postal address - a PO Box in A'Beckett St - as it broke almost every web address verifier he came across. It is one of the very few (only?) PO Box addresses in the world with an apostrophe in it.

And perceptions can be most peculiar. I think in miles in some countires and kilometres in others. Having lived in .au, .uk, and .nz I think in miles for .au & .uk, but kilometres for .nz... It gets most confusing when I visit Adeladie as .au has gone metric since (as) I left, so everything is in kilometres but I still think of the distances in miles 'cos that's how I drove around them in my wild and wooly youth...

As for America, my only real experience is of 4 weeks in Billerica(MA) back in 1990, where driving on the worng side of the road in a car with turn indicators on the wrong side of the steering wheel was my major headache. I was OK when there was traffic about (except for indicating left to turn right & vice versa), but drifted to the left if the road was empty...

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I had noticed that some customers from New Zealand put in something in the "province" section and some didn't, and what got put in there often varied for what otherwise seemed similar addresses. I was considering asking about it (I've got a couple of New Zealanders on my FList), but what you've said pretty much explains it.

Fortunately, the United States Postal Service website itself is actually pretty forgiving in that regard, and as long as we give it the Name, Street Address/PO Box, a City, and a Country, it'll figure out the rest of what it needs to get there.

[t-c-da.livejournal.com]

For the purposes of Rugby, the country is divided into provinces of varying sizes and population distributions, and there is a regional governance layer that overlaps cities, towns, and districts, but neither figure in postal addresses. There are also provincial holidays to mark the founding of each province, just to add to the territorial confusion.

For example, I live in the Wellington region & province, but Wellington does not feature in my postal address (these days - it did until a few years back when NZ Post redrafted the postcode system so that every occurrence of a street name had a unique postcode, at which time they also dropped the Wellington from my postal address). The last house I owned/lived in had a unique street name for the whole country, and my current street has one other occurrence nationwide, out in the back blocks of southern Wairarapa with probably fewer residents than my <1.5km city street.

It doesn't surprise me that USPS can sort it out - the postal guys usually have a pretty broad understanding of international addressing formats - it's the folk to whom the next county is a Foreign Land that try to enforce their local understanding of addressing rules that cause all the problems... The company I work for has to send out invoices to various south Pacific countries apart from the local New Zealand customers, and trying to get folk to understand the intricacies of postal addresses and phone numbers and tax regimes can be a strain sometimes. I guess I'm good at my job because I've worked in several countries and have a natural interest in How Things Work, for many values of "Things"...

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I'm still getting the hang of a lot of it, but I also like figuring out systems, so I actually kind of like working out how to best put together the addresses and things for foreign shipments.

Recently, I've been going back through some of our older databases and such, trying to reconcile several of them that have been updated piecemeal, and there have been a few entries made by my predecessors that I'm amazed ever got anything we shipped them.

[stasia]

we could go more places because the states are so small

That's certainly something I experience when Geordie and I go to New Hamster - everything is right there. The first time I'd gone there with him, when we came back, he asked me what I thought. He didn't understand what I meant (at first) when I said that it felt 'small'. He got a bit offended, but I explained. Three trips later, he turned to me, halfway up Maine after a couple of hours travel time and said, "You know what you said about the East Coast being small? You're right."

I've only had one Brit react that way to where I live - did I know you then? Maybe not. (I did, in fact.) Silly British Woman Here

And are you trying to tell me that Seattle isn't where the Red Indians live?

Stasia

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I was very happy with myself for coming up with that phrasing :)

[t-c-da.livejournal.com]

One could always ask them if they've seen the Lord of The Rings movies...

The Orcs pulled that tree over in the park about 1km from my house, and my bus to/from work drove past Helms Deep every week day of it's existence as a real place...

;-)

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I think the problem may just be poor programming, and them not noticing, since we get the returns, not them.

As best I can tell, they're not having their system pull out the New Zealand Addresses in the same way that it does the other International ones, so they're getting "Address Corrected" as if they were US Addresses: It adds a 0 on the front to make the Postal Code into a ZIP Code and then "corrects" the City to the US City and State corresponding with that ZIP Code.

But it still says "New Zealand" at the bottom, so they're trying to ship it to Pequannock, New Jersey, New Zealand, which just doesn't work.

That is pretty cool that Helms Deep was part of your Commute, tho :)

[t-c-da.livejournal.com]

They'd get it a lot closer if they used Australia as a base and dropped the state bit.

Mangling the addresses to look like US is just plain WRONG and the perpetrator should be fired (if they're still around to be fired).

We use SAP Business One internally and it does a pretty good job of assembling the various bits into the correct format for any country I've had to look at. I've been responsible for most additions to the customer database for 10+ years and have kept a tight reign on changes and format.

OT trivia - The UK Internal Revenue can identify an individual from ( Given Name + house number + post code ) for the purposes of assigning a donator's tax rebate on a donation to the donatee at donation time.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

The odd thing is that they don't screw up Australian Addresses like this, or any other Country (I know there are at least a couple) that use four digit Postal Codes. Just New Zealand.

I'm pretty sure that they're not pulling those Addresses out of the Database before they run the correction for some reason, like they seem to be able to do with every other foreign country we mail to.