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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

#231

Post by Symbiote »

KineticLensman wrote: post #201
orthoxerox wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn't be surprised, a lot of older systems - and the airline industry has a lot of older systems - worked with really tight and compact constraints, for which I'm sure there was a technical reason at the time. There was a story by a man named Amr whose name could never survive a trip through airline booking systems that encode the gender in the given name field: "SMITH/JOHNMR". His name would always come back as…

My initials are J.R. In the US, when these are printed after my surname, a lot of people think I'm Junior.

There's a similar effect with the initials D R, M R or M S.

In Britain, including a dot after abbreviations is a bit dated — it's UK, USA, NASA, JG Smith Motors Ltd, Mr Jones etc. (American usage seems mixed; I sometimes see "USA" and "U.K." in the same sentence.)

That means "Dr Jones", "DR JONES" and "D R JONES" are particularly easy to confuse.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#232

Post by jb1991 »

It's nice to read an article that actually summarizes the entire story first, at the top, in a few short and enjoyable paragraphs, before getting into the depth of the story.

So many articles today don't do this and to sit down and read one feels like the commitment of starting a novel. You have no idea where the story is going and the writer has put themselves on a pedestal, probably wishing they were writing a novel instead. The sentences and paragraphs begin with a lot of atmosphere and little actual narrative.

Journalism is not regular prose, and I wish more journalists would do what is being done in this piece, something that used to be a lot more common in the industry.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#233

Post by bregma »

rhplus wrote: post #125
mauvehaus wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a rather unfortunate coincidence, Ohio started issuing yellow plates with red text to people with too many DUI convictions a decade or so back. You don't often see plates from NM in OH, but when you do, it's a bit confusing.

This seems... wrong? The driver is not the car and vice versa.

Not only that, but such a thing is probably illegal in the USA [0]. Someone needs to take it all the way through to the SCOTUS, although being forced to wear a scarlet letter as a form of public shaming has been ruled on before, if I understand correctly.

[0] https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/constitution-check-is-sh...

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#234

Post by Symbiote »

fakedang wrote: post #25
reaperducer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Mexico Magazine has a column every month where people tell their tales of people thinking that the U.S. state of New Mexico is in the nation of Mexico. Things like insurance and credit card companies cancelling their accounts because they moved out of the country. Apparently it happens all the time.

Wait, so insurance and CC companies are the ones making the mistake?

A colleague's husband had his credit card blocked by his English bank when he travelled from England to Northern Ireland.

He was hiking in an area with limited phone signal, so he phoned his wife (it was a joint account) and she tried to unblock it. The call centre employee said it was because of unexpected foreign travel.

It's easy to believe the call centre person is ignorant.

It's not so clear why the anti-fraud department of one of Britain's largest banks should think the same.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#235

Post by Symbiote »

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.

Nowadays, several smaller European countries recommend prefixing the postcode with the ISO country code:

  Kúpeľná 1/A
  SK-811 02  Bratislava 1
  Slovakia

  Pošta Slovenije d.o.o.
  SI-2500 MARIBOR
  Slovenia
In fact, I see it's a general recommendation for international post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_codes#On_the_us...

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#236

Post by ericmay »

bregma wrote: post #233
rhplus wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems... wrong? The driver is not the car and vice versa.

Not only that, but such a thing is probably illegal in the USA [0]. Someone needs to take it all the way through to the SCOTUS, although being forced to wear a scarlet letter as a form of public shaming has been ruled on before, if I understand correctly. [0] https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/constitution-check-is-sh...

FWIW I can’t recall seeing one of these plates in 10+ years.

I have seen them before, though. Part of my family is a little, uh, rough, and when someone would get these in the past we’d say “oh so and so got their party tags”.

So I’ve always remembered them as party tags... lol.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#237

Post by fennecfoxen »

yongjik wrote: post #168
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…

Not as impressive, but there used to be two stations in Seoul's circular subway line 2, named Sinchon and Sincheon, on the opposite corner of Seoul. In older Romanization scheme it was worse: Shinch'on vs. Shinch'ŏn. (I guess it didn't help that they sound almost identical to an untrained English speaker.) Sadly (for me), they renamed one station, so they aren't confusing any more. Boo.

The NYC subway frequently has multiple stops with the same name, e.g. “23 St” (at Lexington Av, Broadway, 6 Av and 8th Av). That’s not always a big problem in Manhattan, because they’re relatively close. But it gets more interesting when you try to get to DeKalb (L) towards the extreme north end of Brooklyn, while DeKalb (BQR) in downtown Brooklyn is the one people know.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#239

Post by fennecfoxen »

sbierwagen wrote: post #171

A coworker's story: Some clients are flying into Redmond for a meeting, and he's picking them up from the airport. They call. "We're here. Where are you?" "Well, I'm at the airport. Where are you?" "I told you, we're at the airport. How can you miss us? We're the only people here. This place is tiny!" They had flown into Redmond, Oregon, which has an attached municipal airport, instead of Seattle-Tacoma. The meeting…

I have picked up people who wanted to go to Wake Forest University. It is located in the town of Winston-Salem, home of RJR Tobacco.

There is also a town named Wake Forest, home to the original Wake Forest Baptist Manual Labor Institute, then Wake Forest College. Mr. R J Reynolds paid this college to move to his home town, donating the land, but not renaming it.

If you try to go to Wake Forest, NC, you get RDU instead of GSO, and it is an extra 3 hours or so driving round trip.

Re: A lost tourist who thought Maine was San Francisco

#240

Post by ciabattabread »

Xcelerate wrote: post #80

On my first trip to New York City, I immediately turned my iPhone on upon landing (it was night outside) and had a very brief moment of panic that I had somehow boarded the wrong flight when the iPhone weather app said I was in "Jamaica".

And JFK is not even in the actual neighborhood of Jamaica. It’s just an artifact of how the postal codes were assigned - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Queens_neighborhoods#P...
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