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A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

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Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#221

Post by squiggleblaz »

zwayhowder wrote: post #128
RegnisGnaw wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it’s limited to 2 letters.

A lot of smaller platforms I've worked with, before address validation became a standard library to pull in, would have a two character field for state if they were developed in the USA. Most things developed outside the USA tend to put no limit on it. For Concur I think it was built on top of the limitations of the global platforms most airlines use that were designed a long time ago for mainframes that didn't have…

At one point there was an ISO standard for Australian state and territory abbreviations that used two digits. According to that standard, NSW was NS. Unfortunately, since ISO charges six arms and three legs for a standard, businesses can sometimes run on stupid standards that are decades out of date.

My mother saw her return ticket was heading to Melbourne VI and assumed it meant gate 6 at Melbourne airport. It didn't. Fortunately there's no real significance to the return gate at Melbourne airport for an international flight, so it didn't affect me picking her up.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#222

Post by squiggleblaz »

verelo wrote: post #139
RegnisGnaw wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it’s limited to 2 letters.

Because in the US, where the company was founded, the states have 2 letter abbreviations in common language. I wish people could use the ISO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:AU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:US

If you check the link you linked, you'll see that until 2004 the codes were indeed NS for NSW, VI for Vic, TS for Tas and QL for Qld. If you bought the standard for an arm and a leg in 2003, why would you buy the update for two arms and three legs in 2004? It's not like there's been any new states in Australia ever.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#223

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

Ichthypresbyter wrote: post #203
xtracto wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several years ago I lived in La Paz, BCS, Mexico. A friend of mine worked in the Mail service in that city and told me they received A LOT of mail that was meant to be sent to La Paz, Bolivia.

Apparently in several cities the staff of the Slovakian and Slovenian embassies meet regularly to exchange wrongly addressed mail.

The problem is so acute because these two countries’ own names for themselves are even more similar than in English: Slovensko (Slovakia) and Slovenija (Slovenia).

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#224

Post by kuschku »

cyxxon wrote: post #206
ma2rten wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this a very long time ago? Staples is a well known chain of office supply stores in Germany as well.

As a German, I only know Staples from American TV shows and movies. Is there Staples IN Germany? And yes, I live in a city of several hundred thousand inhabitants.

There are several, for example there's one in the Ostseepark Raisdorf, Schwentinental, near Kiel

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#225

Post by qw »

tsar_nikolai wrote: post #174

This reads word for word like the plot of an episode of the Simpsons. Homer the blissfully ignorant brewery worker takes the trip of his life but ends up at the wrong side of the continent from his intended destination where he becomes a local celebrity and gets coersed into all kinds of harmless adventures, like kissing the local seal. As his boss wants capitalize on his fame without giving him a raise, he retaliate…

I haven't seen that episode, but it sounds to me like they based the story on the actual events mentioned in the article

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#226

Post by cafard »

Hah. Pennsylvania has Indiana State and California State universities.

The Missouri portion of the Ozarks has some towns named after states. At a family reunion, a cousin suggested we drive to Nevada, telling me it was another state she hadn't been to. I explained.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#227

Post by jnsaff2 »

Clewza313 wrote: post #50
RegnisGnaw wrote: post #4

I lived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada (eh?) for 23 years and we have similar stories. There is an island that is part of Nova Scotia called Cape Breton with a city named Sydney (so Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada) with population of ~30K. Every few years we get a tourist that confuses that with Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. They generally realize something is wrong when they switch planes in Halifax from a Jet (B…

Extra bonus fun: Concur, everybody's favorite corporate flight booking engine, shows both Sydney, Nova Scotia and Sydney, New South Wales as "Sydney, NS" in the destination selection dropdown.

There’s like a daily flamewar on avherald. They even have a faq entry for this:

Q: Why do you use "wrong" abbreviations (e.g. for New South Wales)?

We use the original ISO 3166 standard (two letter code) to remain compatible with other sources. Therefore the abbreviation for e.g. New South Wales is NS unlike the postal abbreviation NSW.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#228

Post by jbluepolarbear »

djmips wrote: post #216
jbluepolarbear wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did that even happen? Did they not notice getting into the tiniest plane, possibly even a prop plane.

Data point: It's faster to get from Vancouver B.C. to Redmond on a prop plane (landing on Lake Washington) than going via Seatac...

Oh I know, my great grandpa used to fly his plane onto lake Washington all the time.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#230

Post by bregma »

endgame wrote: post #151
verelo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because in the US, where the company was founded, the states have 2 letter abbreviations in common language. I wish people could use the ISO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:AU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:US

We had a chat about that on HN just the other day. It's cheaper to hack something together based on the world around you than it is to pay ISO a bucket of money to read one standard.

But it turns out most people have been doing it all wrong since forever. [0]

[0] https://www.iso.org/standard/73224.html

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