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An old story was someone from France wanting to send the Harry Potter book to someone in Russia. They got their address over email, but in the wrong encoding: h

• gpderetta 5y ago
  the most amazing bit is that the postal employees reversed the bad encoding and delivered the package correctly!
  • chrismorgan 5y ago
    Yet it’s sad that they were able to do this, because it suggests that they’ve encountered it enough to develop a procedure for fixing it. (That seems more likely than it being a one-off thing, since I would expect very few people to be capable of figuring out how to convert it, even if they encounter it commonly.)
    • ginko 5y ago
      >That seems more likely than it being a one-off thing, since I would expect very few people to be capable of figuring out how to convert it, even if they encounter it commonly. I don't know, I'd expect a somewhat tech savvy person in the 90s to figure this out. >open Word >type Cyrillic alphabet in upper and lowercase >try out encodings until the characters look like on the package >print and use as a translation table
    • bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      I'm supposing the procedure is the same as it is in software development which is - go ask old Yuri, he knows what to do / about this sort of thing.
      • squiggleblaz 5y ago
        And the fact that it was done successfully doesn't mean it was done quickly. Heads off to the Russian dead letter office, someone eventually picks it up for a manual review and thinks "this gibberish is too hard for right before lunch" and puts it back. Next day someone else picks it up and thinks "oh, old Yuri knows what to do with this". Or maybe not, maybe it's done quickly. Who knows.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
    • Akronymus 5y ago
      The slovenian and slovakian embassies meet each month to exchange wrongly addressed mail. A package sent to me, living in austria, europe, got sent through australia, australia. Mail errors are common.
      • taejo 5y ago
        It seems strange to me that this is done through diplomatic channels rather than the regular international mail routes between the two countries. Unless you mean the mail for the Slovenian and Slovakian embassies in third countries. But as another example, Korea Post, the South Korean postal service, recommends including "Seoul" in all addresses from outside the country, even if it's going to a different city, to increase the chances of it going to the right Korea.
        • Akronymus 5y ago
          Mail for the embassies afaik. and because it is a lot of pretty important mail, they deem it safer to personally exchange it.
          • taejo 5y ago
            Ah that makes sense. Thanks for answering. I was thinking the Slovenian embassy in Slovakia takes all the misaddressed/misrouted mail for the whole country and vice versa.
    • ramchip 5y ago
      As long as the postal code is legible, they can forward it to the post office for that area and let someone local figure it out. The rough shape and numbers might be enough to tell without a decoding table.
    • ggrrhh_ta 5y ago
      I guess I am getting old... In the "old" times, computers and software came with manuals. A common appendix of those manuals were encoding tables, i.e., every column was an encoding and every row a codepoint. Sometimes you had to introduce relatively common characters by pressing a special key and then the number of the codepoint for the character you wanted to insert.
  • WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
    Back in the day I learned cp437 and its mapping to cp866, and was able to read cyrillic DOS programs without altering the character generator in the graphics card. This was useful on a computer with a sort of Hercules graphics card which didn’t have the capability in text mode and behaved like IBM MDA. Needless to say, my knowledge got outdated fairly quickly.
• simonh 5y ago
  I just find it funny that western Europeans can't tell the difference between Cyrillic writing and random gibberish. By which I genuinely don't mean anything pejorative, in either direction.
  • kergonath 5y ago
    Do you mean printed, or handwritten? Because Sütterlin looks like gibberish to most Europeans. And it is just the standard Latin alphabet, give or take. It looks like some kind of letters, but they could be from the Voynich manuscript and they would still be as understandable. In print, it’s partly because several letters are deceptive and don’t sound anything like the closest-looking ones in the Latin alphabet. Some others are just plain weird-looking if you are not familiar with the alphabet already.
    • WalterBright 5y ago
      > Sütterlin I figured that the way to keep one's personal communications private is to handwrite them in Sütterlin.
  • coldacid 5y ago
    It doesn't help that the cursive Cyrillic T looks like a Latin M.
• chana_masala 5y ago
  > The address was deciphered by the postal employees and delivered successfully. Wow, I want to know more about how the postal worker who deciphered it! On a computer, sure just convert it. But on paper, how did they work it out?
  • WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
    I used to have popular books about computers which had character maps of popular encoding in the appendices. Every book about programming, or using DOS/Windows 9x had them. Each book for system users (not even power users!) had a chapter about different character sets and common problems like this. This was important. I think the post office worker was enough of a geek or they took the package to the computer guy. Still more interesting thing to me was that the sender got the address in the wrong encoding and instead of asking via email, just must have thought that Russians have their little ways and dutifully copied all the gibberish (Russians even have a specific term for misencoded characters: krakozyabras).
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • selfhoster11 5y ago
      The Polish term for such characters in Polish is "krzaczki" (little bushes), presumably because of the visual resemblance between those and the misencoded diacritics. It still shows up occasionally.
  • thriftwy 5y ago
    It's pretty obvious from the letters which are superscripted/skipped First they knew Russia, Moscow by the postcode, so they superscripted РОССИЯ МОСКВА, and then they knew which garbled letters correspond to these ones After which they were able to decipher ПР Р.А.СКО.О after which the address becomes obvious (with the help of index) that it is Проспект Вернадского, 37. I don't think they used any tables other that this implicit table. Which is student dormitory of Moscow State University btw, I looked it up.
• squiggleblaz 5y ago
  The address there is Russia, Moscow, (postcode), (maybe a street name), (some number), (untranslated) Svetlane So it seems to be backwards: The personal name is last, and the country/city is first. Does someone here perhaps know if that is the customary order of address in Russia, or if it was reversed too?
  • WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
    In the whole of USSR (and after its dissolution too), the order of addresses was big-endian: from the larger administrative unit to smaller (which seems quite logical — first you enter the country, then find the district, then the town, then the street, then the house, then the person therein, thus the address replicates the travel path of the package). Some countries (doubtless those that entered EU, also Ukraine, can’t say for the rest) officially changed the order to be little-endian, but many older folks, who still use snail mail and write letters and postcards, don’t bother.
    • hmhhcycbtsc557 5y ago
      I think you're mixing up endianness. The way I understand it, your first paragraph actually describes little endian encoding. I understand it as "the little value (i.e., the insignificant value) at the end". EDIT: In fact maybe I'm wrong, if you consider the lowest byte address the first line of an address label... now I'm confused, haha.
      • coldacid 5y ago
        From Wikipedia: >A big-endian system stores the most significant byte of a word at the smallest memory address and the least significant byte at the largest. A little-endian system, in contrast, stores the least-significant byte at the smallest address. So if you count the address "fields" from top to bottom in ascending order, putting the country first and street address last would be big-endian. If you put the street address first and the country last, that'd be little-endian. Yeah it doesn't make that much sense to me either.
    • 5y ago
• vintermann 5y ago
  By comparison, recently I bought some small homemade electronics thing from Germany. The sender had written Ålesund on the package. Deutsche Post, or possibly whatever system Posten bought from the lowest bidder, declared that Å isn't a real character, so they dropped it. Unfortunately Lesund is also a place. After it had been stuck in the sorting facility for three weeks, I called them up and eventually reached a guy who could explain that oh yes, the system does that and the package gets stuck in a loop, but eventually a human will look at it. It did in fact arrive eventually.
  • q-rews 5y ago
    It’d be kind of ridiculous that a national service would not recognize their own characters as a default. It’s more likely that the general-use OCR failed in your instance.
    • yatac42 5y ago
      Å isn't a German character, it's Norwegian. GP was ordering a package from Germany to Norway.
      • kergonath 5y ago
        But then they mentioned Posten, so whatever the problem was, it wasn’t Deutsche Post’s fault. Also, they should not try to match the address if it is for another country.
        • Symbiote 5y ago
          If the Norwegian postal service receives an item addressed to LESUND, it's hardly their fault to take it there instead of ÅLESUND (town names are often capitalized). A post code should have made the error obvious to the postal system.
          • kergonath 5y ago
            Right. I might be dense but I understood that the address was written correctly on the parcel. So whatever the German post thinks the address is, the label should have been scanned within Denmark, and the issue is likely that the Denmark post’s contractor is incompetent, rather than “lol Germans don’t do foreign names with funny letters” (which is not what the OP wrote, but is the vibe in a lot of replies). And indeed, a post code should render this very difficult in the first place.
• q-rews 5y ago
  I hate and love that. Someone must have seen those characters enough times to have become good at deciphering them. What a waste of time for the postal system though, I’m surprised they didn’t just return to sender.
• RicoElectrico 5y ago
  And at no point did the sender stop and think "this doesn't look like Russian". I mean, it's relatively easy for me, who speaks none of the following languages, to tell appart Chinese, Japanese and Korean. I guess this is consolating for Americans who get blamed for assuming the rest of the world is like their country (postal codes, address formats, date formats, person naming conventions, business customs).