Unbelievable gibberish address corruption

[webcraft]

Just ordered something from Cactusnav to be delivered to Portimão Marina

First Cactus's ordering software corrupted Portimão to Portimaã0, while simultaneously failing to put in anything for the second line of the address.

(Portimão was copied and pasted from the marina website)

Then PayPal further compounded the error to read Marina de Portimão

Then finally Cactus's confirmation e-mail assured me the goods would be sent to Marina de Portimão

. . . by the time it gets on DHL's paperwork it will be utterly unrecognisable. Phone lines are down until Monday because of the Jubilee, and they are threatening to despatch the items on Saturday. I can just imagine the fun I am going to have when we get back to Portugal trying to liberate the goods or get a refund.

You wouldn't, as they say, read about it . . . . the moral of this story would seem to be, don't bother with accents when giving European addresses, because apparently UK-based organisations that deal and ship all over Europe can't cope with it.

- W

 

[Solent Cruiser]

Very true. Our family name has an apostrophe, which causes all sorts of corruptions (from multiple //// insertions and or characters like &). It is pathetc that lazy data entry and or coding fails in software are allowed to continue.

 

[Obi]

Good advice worth knowing. Hope your delivery comes through OK.

 

[ryanroberts]

Yes this is due to lazy programmers not translating between character sets correctly. Apostrophe is also a nightmare, as inserting one into text entry is a common trick by hackers - badly handling them can let you access databases, run programs on web servers etc etc.

Handḻ̒in⃐⃠g unicode is ofte̫n⃡ dͮo⃞ñ̈́e̗͊ v︡͝e͐̅⃟rͯ᷅̐y̜̿̏ͅ b⃖̽ͪ͜ȁ᷊̮̯ͮd̸̻̻̔̔l⃚͍᷊̾⃠ͤý̱̮̰̓᷍

 

[Obi]

You are probably right. In the last couple of years DHL set up at least one separate legal entity as an entirely new business. Possibly it was DHL Express.

I imagine they did this to meet the business opportunity that the lockdown created through increased online shopping and home deliveries. That business came to market with MVP and on a shoe string, so I would not be surprised if their programmers cut corners.

I am a software professional (a proper one, not an ex-barista who makes webpages, or someone who asks "have you switched it on and off"?).

The standards now are so poor as companies often rush to market trying to get their product out before competitors do. We also have lots of people attracted to the industry by salaries rather than having a keen interest in technology: people who then realise they have no aptitude for anything technical and end up following a management stream and trying their best to avoid learning anything valuable. Not a week goes by where I do not hear someone in a meeting say "Sorry, I am not technical".

As for software "engineering" - well the engineering mindset is largely a relic from a previous time.

(Lockdown - what a damnably awful phrase, from prison terminology).