Entertainment For Lively Minds
Absurd e-commerce postal destinations
I was shopping for gifts on the Dilbert (Scott Adams cartoon strip guy...) website yesterday and when I came to the drop-down menu for selecting 'UK' something odd caught my eye - I had another look and, sure enough, the list was littered with absurdities.
South Georgia you could just about understand (peopled by a revolving handful of scientists and government guys all year round; popular with philatelists and penguins), but Heard & MacDonald Islands? Bouvet Island? Ludicrous.
Bouvet Island is the remotest spect of land on earth, never once populated and too inhospitable even for manned weather station.
And the Heard & MacDonald group (also on the cusp of Antarctica) aren't far behind. Here's what wikipedia says:
"The Heard Island and McDonald Islands[1] (abbreviated as HIMI[2]) are an Australian external territory and volcanic group of barren Antarctic islands, about two-thirds of the way from Madagascar to Antarctica. The group's overall size is 372 square kilometres (144 sq mi) in area and it has 101.9 km (63 mi) of coastline. Discovered in the mid-19th century, they have been territories of Australia since 1947 and contain the only two active volcanoes in Australian territory, one of which, Mawson Peak, is the highest Australian mountain. They lie on the Kerguelen Plateau in the Indian Ocean.
"The islands are among the most remote places on Earth: They are located approximately 4,099 km (2,547 mi) southwest of Perth,[3] 3,845 km (2,389 mi) southwest of Cape Leeuwin, Australia, 4,200 km (2,600 mi) southeast of South Africa, 3,830 km (2,380 mi) southeast of Madagascar, 1,630 km (1,010 mi) north of Antarctica, and 450 km (280 mi) southeast of Kerguelen.[4] The islands are currently uninhabited."
So... not on Postman Pat's regular delivery route, then.
Both Heard & Bouvet have 'International Country Codes', which I guess means they slip into these e-commerce mail-order address lists without anyone at the websites actually noticing that they might as well add 'Saturn' and 'Pluto' while they're at it.
But wouldn't it be tremendous fun to actually order something and put one of these places down as the delivery address?
I wonder if anyone ever has, and what happened?
And - most importantly - is it theoretically possible to try and get a Word Subscription delivered to such places... (Sound of Fraser scuttling off to check...)
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On a similar point of over-inclusivity
I joined Camden library yesterday. The drop-down menu on the screen for "Title" consisted of:
Brother
Count
Dame
Dr
Father
Lady
Lord
Master
Miss
Mr
Mrs
Ms
Pastor
Professor
Rabbi
Rev
Sir
Sister
It's like the nineteenth century - and if they're going this far with protocol, why not throw in military ranks as well?
The Boden website is even better.
We're down as Princess and Baron Law.
It also helps for tracing purposes if the buggers ever flog on our details without permission..
The fun I've had, trying to explain the
difference between 'Title' and 'Salutation' to analysts designing Customer databases, and trying to persuade them that they really do want to specify some look-up-tables to hold the relevant reference data.
It's not really a nineteenth century thing, it's a 'let's not lose the customers we already have' thing.
You'd be surprised to know how important these things can be to people, and the likelihood is that those for whom it is most important are the high-net-worth customers you really want to impress, or at least avoid pissing off.
Maybe it's not vital for Camden library, but if you're running an upmarket retail company, or a Financial Services outfit that caters for nobs, it's bread and butter stuff.
High falutin' salutations
When I was working for a financial adviser firm as a young man, I was written to by a vicar, to point out that the salutation "Dear Reverend" that I used in my letter to him was wrong. He blamed the verger in Dad's Army, who always addressed the vicar as "Reverend". He wrote - "that was funny because it is wrong, and a competent verger would know that".
The funny thing is, I enjoyed that letter and responded politely back, thanking him for his guidance. It was a bit like corresponding with Frank Muir. I think we bonded.
Since you didn't spell it out
it's 'Dear Reverend [Christian name]' not surname, as you so often hear.
Honorifics are another area often left out of computer databases: The Rev Ian Campbell BD, OBE (these may be in the wrong order) is not possible to enter in most of them. I worked at ipc, where mailing lists for Horse and Hound had to have surname fields twice the usual length, and which included Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
Mister Mister
It was a very long time ago, so my memory is a little hazy, but I think he advised to address him as "Dear Mr (Surname)" - but happy to be corrected on that.
Another minefield are medical professionals that move from Mister to Doctor and then to Mister again and then get uppity about it.
Antarctic Bases
Rothera and Halley Stations both have official post offices, and are therefore proper postal destinations. Though in reality they are c/o Stanley, Falkland Islands.
Bouvet
Sounds like my kind of holiday destination. Love the wikitravel page: http://wikitravel.org/en/Bouvet_Island
Looking forward to your...
...travel piece in Word this time next year Fraser! :-)
Dilbert
Considering the site you were shopping from, are you sure it wasn't just a "nerd in-joke" ?
I can imagine that the Dilbert and the Gary Larson audiences would enjoy spotting those absurd addresses...
"The islands are among the most remote places on Earth"
Any truth in the rumour that Van the Man is looking at properties there ??
Timezones, too!
A few years ago I tested financial software, which allowed parties all over the world to buy and sell shares.
As well as testing the system, we also had to set up each customer's own test environment. This required typing a lot of customer specific details into a couple of Java applications, to specify what exchanges the customer was going to trade on, who they were trading with, what transaction types they supported and so on. Critically, though, we also had to specify the customers start and end times, based on their local timezone.
Whoever had set up this application had obviously not tried to use the thing. The timezone list appeared to contain every single valid timezone in the world, listed by name of their location, in no specific order, , so you had to resort to hunt-and-peck to find things. There were many very obscure places in the list who we were very unlikely to trade with, and were only include because they had odd rules. Entries included:
Broken Hill - a town in the New South Wales outback which uses a different timezone to the rest of the state.
Lord Howe Island - an island far off the East Coast of Australia with a population of about 300.
Tristan da Cunha - the most isolated inhabited island on Earth, population even lower than Lord Howe Island.
Saint Pierre and Miquelon - a French overseas territory situated off the coast of Newfoundland, population a few thousand.
"Java applications"
...I guess you had fun trying to explain these to speculators on Java?
Saint Pierre & Miquelon - who knew? Not me...
Lord Howe Island - known only for some idiot captaining a Royal Navy vessel crashing into it and causing the world's longest tow-back-to-port situation a few years ago.
Tristan Da Cunha - part of the Ascension/St Helena/Tristan group of UK administered Atlantic islands, but - bizarrely - the currency those 300 people use is the standard British pound, not the St Helena pound as used by the other two islands. It also has officially the world's worst golf course. The potato was also a valid unit of currency until very recently. (Which, let's be honest, makes more sense than a bit of paper - no matter what you call it - if you're isolated from the world on a small speck of land with no Tesco nearby.)
Ha! Very good, Exciteable...
...and yes Locust, my first thought was that this MUST be some kind of deeply entrenched joke. But (pauses for consideration before saying...) the average American doesn't even know where Europe is. So, no - I discounted the thought pretty swiftly!
I thought I'd spotted Tanu-Tuva in there as well (a deeply obscure quasi-country within central Asia which ceased being an entity after about 5 minutes in the 1930s , I think, and is now known chiefly for its throat-singing tradition... and yes, I must go off and look that one up on wiki too...) - but no: it was Tuvalu I'd seen. (Only slightly less ludicrously, a country whose chief source of economy is its internet domain name: .tv - but a bona fide, inhabited nation none the less!)
I have absolutely no idea why anyone (and who exactly DOES decide these things anyway?) gave international country codes to those never-inhabited, never-likely-to-be-inhabited, owned-by-other-countries lumps of inaccessible rock in the ocean. What possible reason could there have been?
Actually, the converse of this is that until recently I understand that St Helena (a long inhabited albeit remote British-administered island in the south Atlantic) didn't have any postcode assigned to it - which apparently disenfranchised residents from being able to order goods from amazon (there's been a supply ship from Britain once a year in recent times... which has now ceased as of this year, in the hope that the island's airport will be finished fairly soon). I think the postcode's been sorted out now.
Anyway... let's hope no Viscount tries to join Camden Library. Imagine the scene there'd be...
St Helena
My mate Hugh, then a Naval barrister, applied for the post of governor a few years back.
He didn't get the job. But the nephew of one of patients did. Much to the chagrin of the rest of his family who were hoping he'd get a cushy FO post somewhere nice so they could all go and visit him.
Well, they could still visit him Len but...
...it costs a fortune and they'd be obliged to stay for some months till the boat to Britain or South Africa next came! (I work with a chap from St Helena...)
But still, the Governor of St H is a pretty cushy post - as long as you don't want to live the high life. There wouldn't be much to do.
Apparently there's been a crime spree there recently: someone graffiti'd 'French out' on the walls of the public toilet block in the town.
I said to my friend, 'Surely all the policeman needs to do is ask who bought a can of spray paint from the shop recently?'
'Ah, no, somebody'll have bought it months ago, biding their time...' he said.
It's so small they had it carpeted
I've met people from Pitcarin Island. About 3 years ago I was doing some work for the British High Commission in Wellington - and three of them happened to be visiting. Population 60. Pitcairn Island is 3,000 miles away from NZ and then another 3,000 miles to Chile.
And worryingly....
...the Pitcairn Island culture seems to have evolved/devolved into one of paedophilia (as per news stories three or four years ago). Some of the perpetrators were 'house arrested' on the island - which sounds utterly meaningless.
It would suggest that very isolated communities of small populations are not going to end happily. Look at what happened to the Easter Islanders - advanced culture/cut down all the trees/infighting/reduced to primitive existence... and then Europeans arrive.
This didn't happen on St Kilda, though...
If anyone's interested in reading more about extremely
remote islands and various interesting stories associated with them, I can recommend "Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will" by the German writer Judith Schalansky.
The book has been a huge surprise hit in Germany (original title: "Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln: Fünfzig Inseln, auf denen ich nie war und niemals sein werde").
I've leafed through that book, Duc...
...it's beautifully produced/designed but the text is impressionistic to say the least. Not exactly a source of reference, more a quirky coffee table tome...