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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 likel

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.

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.