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I have a close friend who lives in rural Ireland. That's not in a town, but on a small farm in a general area of about 15-20 other small farms. His address is j
by phillc73 11y ago
I have a close friend who lives in rural Ireland. That's not in a town, but on a small farm in a general area of about 15-20 other small farms. His address is just the name of the general area and the county.
The Irish postal system is clever enough to know that the person with this name, in that general area lives in that house. In fact, he probably still isn't even really classified by his name, rather as the husband of his wife, whose family has been in the general area for generations.
This article made me think about how he deals with online forms. His response was that it's been a godsend that finally this year Ireland has introduced postcodes. Previously, and if the form still insists on a house number and street name, he just "bashes his head against the wall."
- Grishnakh 11y agoIreland is like that throughout the whole country, except maybe Dublin. It's worked for them for ages; there's been articles written about wackily-addressed mail being sent to people in Ireland and arriving to the correct destination. (I remember one that was just a long description going something like "the lad who..."). The problem is if someone in Ireland tries to order something from a company in another country, where the computer system isn't set up to handle totally arbitrary addresses. Even UK addresses look pretty anarchic to someone in America, where every address has a street name, a house number, a city, a state, and a zip code. UK addresses will have a postal code, and a city name, but after that there's no telling; it'll frequently list smaller and smaller towns and then some hamlet, and not have any kind of street or house number. If you design your address-storage system to just handle two arbitrarily-long "street" lines, plus a city and postal code, that should handle everything in the UK. For Ireland, just don't require a postal code. The problem is when programmers try to place restrictions on the address to ensure it has "correct formatting". Don't do that; if you need to verify the address, there's APIs you can subscribe to in different countries to check address correctness. Doing it yourself is how these problems happen.
- Symbiote 11y ago> UK addresses will have a postal code, and a city name, but after that there's no telling; it'll frequently list smaller and smaller towns and then some hamlet, and not have any kind of street or house number. Royal Mail don't recommend these long addresses; there's a form on their website to produce a canonical address, something like [Building name] [Number] Street [Hamlet/village/town] TOWN PO57 C0DE However, good luck telling anyone who's proud of their tiny hamlet this... http://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode http://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode (and the "Read our PAF Code of Practice (PDF)" link).
- beejiu 11y agoThe fact that addresses don't come in canonical form is an interesting challenge for anybody who wants to verify addresses, e.g. for fraud preventing. Actually, many banks, when verifying addresses for online transactions, just strip out all non-numeric characters when doing address verification.
- takno 11y agoMy apartment has two different apartment numbers, the right one and the one that Royal Mail made up for their database. Makes it interesting to match things up on different accounts
- DrJokepu 11y agoAlso, a lot of websites have this thing where you have to enter your postal code and then you can pick your address from a list of addresses associated with the postal code. I used to live in a development for a while that was so new that it didn't appear in many of these databases, so signing up for various services (or even paying council tax) was near impossible.
- phillc73 11y agoI had a similar, derived issue. A new house I was renting was marketed as "24 Street Name",the lease document was written as such and the front door had a number 24 on it. However, after moving in, we discovered that on all official databases it was "24-26 Street Name". This caused a number of frustrations over the years. After a while we just put "24-26" on everything and be done with it.
- twic 11y ago> if you need to verify the address, there's APIs you can subscribe to in different countries to check address correctness If you do this, just bear in mind that the APIs aren't always correct, either. While working on a project that used data from the Royal Mail's Postcode Address File recently, we found a couple of people on the team whose addresses weren't in it. And then there's my friend whose flat has an address, but where that address has been stolen by a neighbour with a more prominent front door, effectively leaving my friend addressless.
- grecy 11y agoIn Northern Canada there are a lot of towns that don't have street names, just references like "brown house". Everyone in town knows everyone, so it's simply not needed. Lately Canada Post has been trying to force them to have street names, so in the provisioning system of the telco that serves the area you get awesome addresses like "next to brown house" or "around corner from house next to brown house".
- mikeash 11y agoThe house I grew up in had an address of "the first house east of the post office." We had a box at the post office for regular mail, but for stuff like mail order computer parts, we'd use that address. It mostly worked. Every so often we'd get a UPS driver with a bad sense of direction and we'd have to go pick up our package from our neighbors on the other side of the post office.
- grecy 11y agoThe towns I'm talking about are thousands of miles from the nearest UPS or FedEx driver. In fact, tons of them can not be driven to :)
- jdfellow 11y agoI know a guy in Ireland who has an envelope proudly displayed among his many other collected items, which is simply addressed to His Name, Ireland. It found him safe and sound, probably from Burma or some such place too.
- protomyth 11y agoWhere I lived (and now work) the streets had no names. Well, actually the electric company had names for them, but didn't really tell anyone. For years, I had stuff sent to "House 311 behind the school". FedEx refused to ship to us unless its a school or business and you had to drive 90+ miles to pick it up. UPS delivered fine. It did take a bit to train new drivers. USPS did not do any home delivery (PO box or nothing). After the whole 911 push, we theoretically have names for all the streets, but they are not posted.