"Falsehoods programmers believe about geography: Street adresses contain street names.
In many remote places in Europe, the hamlet name is considered a sufficient address."
Yup, I used to spend my summers on an island where my address would be: farmstead name, island, country. Zip code was optional. Had to find creative ways to satisfy various web forms.
Another that list misses is that houses must be reachable by street at all. My girlfriend 20 years ago had an address on a canal (though the back of her house was reachable by unnamed alleyways).
The thing about postal databases bit me many times being the first owner of a new home, too. So many times some software system didn't believe my address was valid because my builder filed the original deed incorrectly. Actually, this was worse because I couldn't even pay property tax for three years until it was fixed, but believe me software service X that told me my address didn't exist, my house is real and every delivery service I have ever tried to use managed to find it.
Lived in Puerto Rico for a while a few years back, and stuff off the beaten path (and plenty of things in town as well) wouldn't have an "address number", but instead would have a "position" based off kilometer markers.
For a good year, my address was something like "KM 5.4 Carr. 635", which was effectively "Kilometer 5.4 Highway 635". And then the put out new kilometer markers and my address changed by 0.2km in one way according to the power company and the other way according to the water company.
And IIRC, the power company had "yellow house in the back" as part of my address, since there were three houses on this lot. Don't know what would've happened if I painted the house!
Edit: Ha! Looks like a few things have changed in Google Maps and a number of things now have addresses showing up with their km marker numbers, which didn't use to be the case. For example, the Caribbean Cinemas location in Arecibo, Puerto Rico [0] has the address "Carr. #2, Km. 81.0 Barrio Hato Abajo, Arecibo, PR 00612"
One that's repeatedly tripping me up while I'm living on in the Caribbean is "all addresses have ZIP codes". They've started adding postal codes here but not many places have them. It's easy enough to enter 00000 but before moving here I wouldn't have known there are places without some form of post code.
Hell, getting things to understand barrios when I lived in PR.... Yes, this address looks like it has two cities on the address. Nope, that's how it's supposed to be.
Or the hassle of trying to figure out whether a website was gonna list PR under State or Country or just not have it at all. I got really good at modifying web forms with Chrome devtools to inject Puerto Rico into the State drop-downs so I could just get shit shipped.
And for a while I didn't have any way to receive mail at the house I was renting, so I had stuff shipped to work, but they only had a rural box addr, so the addr was "Box 1234....". Anything shipping via UPS/FedEx didn't wanna touch it, so we had an alternate address for each of them (since UPS's system couldn't find one address form and FedEx couldn't find the other) and I'd have to find out who the seller was shipping with.
I got really good at modifying web forms with Chrome devtools to inject Puerto Rico into the State drop-downs so I could just get shit shipped.
Wow. I've never thought of this... I can think of three places I've reached out to in order to have a company manually update my address because of this just in the last two months.
Doesn't always work, but when it does, makes you feel like a hacker!
I always tried it first, and if needed would reach out to the company afterwards.
Had one company call me after tweaking the form in Chrome and ask how I managed to place the order with that address. After playing dumb for a bit, I sheepishly admitted to altering the form. They were upset at first, but after explaining that they used USPS and USPS handled mail to PR just fine and required no export papers, they actually thanked me and updated their site themselves to handle shipping to PR.
Comments
"Falsehoods programmers believe about geography: Street adresses contain street names. In many remote places in Europe, the hamlet name is considered a sufficient address."
Yup, I used to spend my summers on an island where my address would be: farmstead name, island, country. Zip code was optional. Had to find creative ways to satisfy various web forms.
Another that list misses is that houses must be reachable by street at all. My girlfriend 20 years ago had an address on a canal (though the back of her house was reachable by unnamed alleyways).
The thing about postal databases bit me many times being the first owner of a new home, too. So many times some software system didn't believe my address was valid because my builder filed the original deed incorrectly. Actually, this was worse because I couldn't even pay property tax for three years until it was fixed, but believe me software service X that told me my address didn't exist, my house is real and every delivery service I have ever tried to use managed to find it.
Lived in Puerto Rico for a while a few years back, and stuff off the beaten path (and plenty of things in town as well) wouldn't have an "address number", but instead would have a "position" based off kilometer markers.
For a good year, my address was something like "KM 5.4 Carr. 635", which was effectively "Kilometer 5.4 Highway 635". And then the put out new kilometer markers and my address changed by 0.2km in one way according to the power company and the other way according to the water company.
And IIRC, the power company had "yellow house in the back" as part of my address, since there were three houses on this lot. Don't know what would've happened if I painted the house!
Edit: Ha! Looks like a few things have changed in Google Maps and a number of things now have addresses showing up with their km marker numbers, which didn't use to be the case. For example, the Caribbean Cinemas location in Arecibo, Puerto Rico [0] has the address "Carr. #2, Km. 81.0 Barrio Hato Abajo, Arecibo, PR 00612"
[0] https://caribbeancinemas.com/theater/arecibo/
One that's repeatedly tripping me up while I'm living on in the Caribbean is "all addresses have ZIP codes". They've started adding postal codes here but not many places have them. It's easy enough to enter 00000 but before moving here I wouldn't have known there are places without some form of post code.
In puerto rico up until very recently (with some lagging behind) it is the condominium building name, apt # and a zip code.
Hell, getting things to understand barrios when I lived in PR.... Yes, this address looks like it has two cities on the address. Nope, that's how it's supposed to be.
Or the hassle of trying to figure out whether a website was gonna list PR under State or Country or just not have it at all. I got really good at modifying web forms with Chrome devtools to inject Puerto Rico into the State drop-downs so I could just get shit shipped.
And for a while I didn't have any way to receive mail at the house I was renting, so I had stuff shipped to work, but they only had a rural box addr, so the addr was "Box 1234....". Anything shipping via UPS/FedEx didn't wanna touch it, so we had an alternate address for each of them (since UPS's system couldn't find one address form and FedEx couldn't find the other) and I'd have to find out who the seller was shipping with.
Wow. I've never thought of this... I can think of three places I've reached out to in order to have a company manually update my address because of this just in the last two months.
Doesn't always work, but when it does, makes you feel like a hacker!
I always tried it first, and if needed would reach out to the company afterwards.
Had one company call me after tweaking the form in Chrome and ask how I managed to place the order with that address. After playing dumb for a bit, I sheepishly admitted to altering the form. They were upset at first, but after explaining that they used USPS and USPS handled mail to PR just fine and required no export papers, they actually thanked me and updated their site themselves to handle shipping to PR.