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Oh, I like the leading zero. I worked for the telco that runs Northern Canada - all the way up to and inside the Arctic Circle. Most communities there don't ha
by grecy 9y ago
Oh, I like the leading zero.
I worked for the telco that runs Northern Canada - all the way up to and inside the Arctic Circle. Most communities there don't have the concept of street names or house numbers at all. Our provisioning database had addresses like "brown house down from church" and "three houses from general store". Many were just "house1","house12","house334455" etc.
As horrible as it was, our data was the best in existence, to the point Canada Post was asking to use it :)
- mikeash 9y agoI grew up in a village in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and it was the same thing there. For normal mail, we had a box at the post office, which was conveniently right next to our house. (Smallest post office in the state, I believe.) For delivery services like UPS, we would tell them "the first house east of the post office." It usually worked. Occasionally we got a UPS driver who was directionally impaired, and we had to go over to our neighbor on the other side of the post office and get our package from them.
- jvolkman 9y agoDid the town ever consider just adding numbers?
- mikeash 9y agoIt wasn't big enough to be a separate political unit. It looks like the county eventually added street names and numbers, so people have normal addresses now. I left in the early 90s, before that happened. I did see the same process happen in rural Wisconsin in the late 90s. I had an address by then, but I had a friend who lived out of town and had no address initially, but they went through and assigned one to everyone. I think the stated reason was to help emergency services, but of course it helped a lot of other stuff too.
- mod 9y agoI live in an area that is similar, in the rural US. I do have a street address, a long ways up a dirt road, but google maps can't locate it. Not even the locals know the streets by names. For friends and family, since I am technically savvy, I was able to figure out a google maps lat/lng that navigates to my house. For locals or, for instance, utility workers that I can't send a lat/lng to, I have to give directions like this. "Go past the school, take the road to the right. Turn left at the cemetary. When you're on the dirt road, take the high road at every fork. After 4 miles you will come to three mailboxes all together, and my driveway is the 2nd one after that." My street address also has the word "box" in it, despite being a physical address, so lots of places like Paypal don't want to accept it s a real address. It's caused me some grief and actually cost me some money, too.
- _jal 9y agoI went to grade (actually, "grammar") school in a similar place. We were something like "Rural Route 3 Box 39" or something like that, but we really on the Old Highway, first on the left after where Maynis' barn was before it burnt down as you're headed out of town. I am not making that up, and yes, the locals delighted in giving directions like that to visitors. I didn't like that town.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoI think every small town has a set of "turn right where the barn used to be" directions.
- gregmac 9y ago"Turn left on the road before the house with the bright yellow door, and then drive about 5 minutes and it's the second house on the left". Oh how I hate those directions. "Ok, there's a house with a yellow-ish door, but it's kind of a dull yellow. Is that the one? Should I turn here or keep going?"
- tonyarkles 9y agoI have so many curiosity questions about your experiences up north. I'm guessing it was NorthwesTel?
- grecy 9y agoYep. Fire away with questions if you want. I absolutely loved my time there and can't wait to get back. There are plenty of my photos here http://theroadchoseme.com/category/canada http://theroadchoseme.com/category/canada
- dmix 9y agoHow was the DB structured? For example was "brown house down from church" in some sort of structured field ("Address 1") or more open ended? What if the brown house was painted red, could those with local knowledge update it in a timely way? And why would Canada Post need your data? Was it just a typical slow moving state enterprise or did you guys just do a better job? They likely had many decades more experience than your company...
- grecy 9y agoThis was all in a commercial off-the-shelf provisioning tool that probably every telco in North America uses, so the database was very structured. There were forced fields like "address line 1", "Address line 2", and our staff had just forced in whatever would go. Updating it was certainly possible, though I don't think much effort was being made. In those communities we probably had less than 50 unique addresses, in some other places we have tens of thousands. Canada Post had no info on these communities, and they decided ours was better than nothing. Remember, we are talking extremely, extremely remote villages in the Arctic Circle, many of which are fly in only (no roads).
- gumby 9y agoMy grandmother (in South Australia) didn't agree when they instituted house numbers (in the 1960s I believe) and continued to gave out her house name, never the number. I still have no idea what her house number was. I'm not sure how she voted (it's compulsory in AUS) but apart that (possible) problem it seemed to cause no inconvenience.
- jimmux 9y agoI grew up on a few Aussie properties, and some of them had no numbered address. Road Mail Box numbers seem to be pretty common now, but back then it was more like "Bindabundee Homestead, Bindabundee Road, NSW". For one place I don't even know the road name, because nobody used it officially. It was just "the Snake Track", and everyone on that road had their mail addressed to the post office, which was really a general store with a few PO boxes, and we trusted each other not to take mail with someone else's name on it.