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It often happens with things designed and made in the USA. It is assumed that the terminology or customs of the USA apply to the rest of the world, when it's of
by dkdbejwi383 6y ago
It often happens with things designed and made in the USA. It is assumed that the terminology or customs of the USA apply to the rest of the world, when it's often not the case.
For example, their bizarre date system. Widespread use of state abbreviations and timezone abbreviations that are only known in the USA. "Zip code" on forms for customers in New Zealand or India or France.
- duckmysick 6y agoGood point overall. I disagree with the abbreviations being exclusively a US thing. Two letter country abbreviations (UK, DE, IE, FR, DK, etc.) are popular in Europe, including on the back of food packaging which lists ingredients in multiple languages.
- input_sh 6y agoYes, but, when taken out of context, you have no idea if you're looking at a state abbreviation or a country abbreviation. AL can be Alabama or Albania, AZ can be Arizona or Azerbaijan, DE could be Germany or Delaware, etc. Just under half of US state abbreviations are "unique" (as in, not also used for some country in the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard). Personally I'm mostly annoyed by the concept of states when filling out delivery address. When I enter my country (that has no concept of states), I often find myself having to make something up because the state field is a required field.
- lagadu 6y agoEven worse: sometimes they do ask "state" and have a dropdown list of American states. If you live in another country that does have states, you're SOL. Why would your dropdown still have those when I selected a different country?
- input_sh 6y agoAlso why's the country picker at the bottom? I've learned to fill it out first and scroll back up the hard way. Otherwise you never know when fields will completely change when you select a country, or just discard everything you've entered previously.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- watwut 6y agoTo be fair, I have seen non Americans making basically same assumptions. I have even once seen a thread where Easter Europeans who never been in America argued with Americans about meaning of English word and about American culture. It was literally "are you sure you know better then American how Americans would interpret that word/situation in their day to day life" situation.
- funcDropShadow 6y agoAre you sure that English is defined by its usage in the United States of America? Or is it defined by the usage in, let's say, in England?
- watwut 6y agoIn the context where American used word or expression and talked to other Americans, yes absolutely. If we talked about English person speaking to Emglish, we would take English usage. But context was American speech and Eastern Europans who know America only from movies thinking they know all about it.
- funcDropShadow 6y agoHere is an interesting idea, they might know it from their English lessons in school. Which might have taught British English and not American English. But who knows.
- lagadu 6y agoDates are the worst. 11/12/2020, is that November 12th or is that December 11th? I don't know and your shitty system makes no attempt to let me know whether they're using the regional format or the world-wide one.
- raverbashing 6y agoZip Codes are used "more or less worldwide" and usually have a direct translation so that's not so much of an issue But yeah how the f someone though MM/DD/YY was a god date format and they kept using this monstrosity still baffles me Edit: translating the expression "Zip Code" to the equivalent in other countries is a non-issue (be it postal codes, etc). It's a code used by the post. No mystery there. Of course, they have different formats in different places so don't validate them as US Zip codes
- mkl 6y agoZIP codes are American: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code NZ has postcodes, and they're 4 digits, which confuses some websites. Yes, the dates are ridiculous. I've had to use an online assessment system with hard-coded backwards American due date formatting that I have to warn students about. The vendor just shrugged.
- dkdbejwi383 6y agoAs another poster pointed out, elsewhere "postal code" is usually used. The format differs. In some places it might be 4121, somewhere else it might be SW1A 1AA. In the ROI, there are no post codes.
- circlefavshape 6y agoThere are now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland#Eircode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republ...
- Macha 6y agoDriven primarily by frustration with foreign companies expecting post codes - the postal service was late to computerising which paid off in having better OCR/address lookup when they finally did so actually said they were pretty indifferent to the implementation of postcodes.
- 6y ago