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threemonkeysReasons why New Zealand and Australia will never unify - #12: Addresses.
I was filling out an online registration form earlier. It was for a local only product from the local subsidiary of a dutch based multi-national. I know they have a local presence because I walked past their head office today. The form contained fields for my address as follows: address, suburb, state and postcode. In other words, an Australian format address. I was just a bit irked because the creators of the form had obviously used a form designed for Australia and hadn't bothered to change the fields to be appropriate to the people using it.
It got me thinking again about the standard Aussie address format. I have had plenty of reason to contemplate it in the past. Back when I was at the BNZ, we shared a fraud detection system with the National Australia Bank. We had to format data out of one of our local systems to send it to this shared system over the Tasman. The problem was that the target system was set up for Australian style addresses and we had huge difficulties mapping our address data into the correct fields. The problem being that we had both a suburb field and a town/city field to deal with. The issue proved quite a tricky one and ultimately meant the system was not as effective as it should have been for us. About the time I left, a replacement system just for New Zealand was being trialled.
I understand why the Australian system works the way it does. A population distribution has the majority of the people concentrated in the capital cities means that town/city is less important than suburb and state for a large chunk of the population. It is not the same here. In fact I wonder if anybody has come across the same system anywhere. What other odd addressing systems are there out there? The British have always claimed to have the most precise method of defining an address. I wonder who has the most confusing.
I was filling out an online registration form earlier. It was for a local only product from the local subsidiary of a dutch based multi-national. I know they have a local presence because I walked past their head office today. The form contained fields for my address as follows: address, suburb, state and postcode. In other words, an Australian format address. I was just a bit irked because the creators of the form had obviously used a form designed for Australia and hadn't bothered to change the fields to be appropriate to the people using it.
It got me thinking again about the standard Aussie address format. I have had plenty of reason to contemplate it in the past. Back when I was at the BNZ, we shared a fraud detection system with the National Australia Bank. We had to format data out of one of our local systems to send it to this shared system over the Tasman. The problem was that the target system was set up for Australian style addresses and we had huge difficulties mapping our address data into the correct fields. The problem being that we had both a suburb field and a town/city field to deal with. The issue proved quite a tricky one and ultimately meant the system was not as effective as it should have been for us. About the time I left, a replacement system just for New Zealand was being trialled.
I understand why the Australian system works the way it does. A population distribution has the majority of the people concentrated in the capital cities means that town/city is less important than suburb and state for a large chunk of the population. It is not the same here. In fact I wonder if anybody has come across the same system anywhere. What other odd addressing systems are there out there? The British have always claimed to have the most precise method of defining an address. I wonder who has the most confusing.
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Date: 2007-05-04 09:43 am (UTC)No sooner was the show broadcast than people started sending letters to it with ever more silly addresses on the envelopes. The presenter was a lady called Esther Rantzen whose prevailing characteristic was a very pronounced overbite. The "winning" letter to the programme had as its address a drawing of an open mouth with huge protruding teeth.