One shouldn’t laugh at foreigners for getting things that are obvious to oneself completely wrong, but sometimes it’s pretty hard.
For instance, the person from the UK who wrote us an angry email today because they couldn’t use one of our websites to send their brother a gift. Apparently the website kept rejecting the postcode, which simply isn’t good enough.
The address they were trying to send to?
Street Address: West Beach Adelaide SA New South Wales 5024
Suburb: Adelaide
State: New South Wales
Postcode: 08
Which is more or less the equivalent of…
Street Address: Sopley Southampton Hants Cumbria BH23
Suburb: Southampton
County: Cumbria
Postcode: 016973
…and no more likely to result in a successful delivery.
I know that international address formats can be confusing – I’ve had to deal with lots of them while coding some of our systems – but randomly throwing chunks of them at a form in the hopes that the computer will somehow be able to sort it all out can only be described as optimism of the most wild variety.
