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By comparison, recently I bought some small homemade electronics thing from Germany. The sender had written Ålesund on the package. Deutsche Post, or possibly w
by 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 agoIt’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 agoÅ isn't a German character, it's Norwegian. GP was ordering a package from Germany to Norway.
- kergonath 5y agoBut 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 agoIf 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 agoRight. 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.
- Symbiote 5y agoThe OP wrote that Deutsch Post (probably) or Posten (possibly) messed it up. The Germans messing it up seems much more likely. There are plenty of Norwegian addresses containing Å/Æ/Ø.
- kergonath 5y agoYeah but that does not make any sense. Deutsche Post would not have changed the label so the address would still be correct.
- Symbiote 5y agoI have no idea why you think it's inconceivable that Deutsche Post wouldn't corrupt the label, but Posten (Norwegian Post), who actually use the letter Å, would have.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI'm confident OCR fails on a regular basis, which is why they still have humans in place to interpret addresses.
- inglor_cz 5y agoAnecdotally, I had this kind of experience mostly from services in big countries. France, Germany, Italy. Small countries' services (Slovakia, Bulgaria) need to serve many more customers abroad, so they tend to be more friendly towards foreign characters not found in their national alphabets.
- kergonath 5y agoFrom my experience the French post deals with these just fine. They have to, this issue is quite common. I have regularly received mail with a mangled address because whoever sent it did not bother to check encoding and some Unicode got printed as something else. Also, if you write the country at the bottom (as you should), they will just send it to wherever that country’s postal services will pick it up without bothering to match whatever’s on top to a local place.
- inglor_cz 5y agoI think the worst mangled address I ever saw was on a package ordered from Italy. The second worst was USA. Unfortunately, my address has a lot of accentuated characters (Ř, Á, Č, Ž).
- kergonath 5y agoI have seen a fair bit of those from the US as well (mine had both é and à).
- throw0101a 5y ago> Also, if you write the country at the bottom (as you should), they will just send it to wherever that country’s postal services will pick it up without bothering to match whatever’s on top to a local place. If one is able to design a postal addressing scheme (many just evolve in an ad hoc fashion over time), being able to fail gracefully is a handy feature to have. In Canada, our postal code system was set up in the 1970s, and is reasonably rational: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada If an international shipper can (a) get the package to Canada Post (by writing "Canada" on it), and (b) has the postal code on it, then it can be narrowed down to a fairly small geographic area: * https://www.google.com/maps/place/A1A+1A1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/A1A+1A1 * https://www.google.com/maps/place/M4A+1A1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/M4A+1A1