The most common phone number

A vendor tried to sell us an application for keeping trach of real estae. It was running successfuly elsewhere.
Problem was it was running only in small towns. What's wrong with that?
Well, everyone else in the room was very impressed with the system. After praises were sung I asked the vendor about the street name. Seems you only can enter six characters and there is no field for Street, Place, Avenue, Etc. When the vendor explained that six characters was al we got and we would have to give code names to many streets to differentiate them the meeting came to a quick end.
Its hard enough getting the data right without having data entry folk having to change it while entering.
BENTIP -- Pseky Uncle Ben has another hot stock for you.

And I thought it was horsepucky when a mailer wanted us (USPS) to compress every address in the system (master addressing db) to 25 characters or less, including apt/ste numbers. Oy. After 20 years as more or less an addressing expert, 6 characters for a street name ranks as one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. BTW, USPS has a publication for address formatting if you ever need the info, it's Publication 28, "Postal Addressing Standards". Available on usps.com.

VAPBE-Various Architects Purchasing Belligerent Echidnas

Thanks for the tip, I downloaded that USPS publication, and searched for an exception to an addressing headache I discovered in my town. There's a house on a small court or cul-de-sac that has a house number of zero. Yes, good old placeholder, zip, zilch, nada, goose egg. The house number sign by the door spells it out as "ZERO", but when I spoke with the family living there, they said it did cause them some grief from time to time. Just for fun, my friend and I tried entering it in a GPS to ask for directions, and it wouldn't take it.

I know of at least three other weird addresses like it in our town. The best is probably the house with an address on one street, but the street ends before it gets there, not even a dirt or gravel path, just a grassy yard. You have to travel up a railroad service road to get to it.

I retired from the USPS last year, and my office delivered mail to a former Air Force base.

When the base was being converted for civilian use and a developer was remodeling (rebuilding) several of the old hangers, the city approved addresses of Hanger 1 through Hanger 4, with no street information attached or required by the city. Of course, they didn't bother checking with the PO before they approved them, and it took the Address Management people at the district office about three months to figure out how to include those four addresses in the AMS database. And naturally the city didn't bother telling us about it until the buildings were ready to receive tenants. How do you tell a million dollar customer that his mail is not being delivered because USPS computers don't accept his address?

If Hartford were in Illinois, every person would have been registered as a qualified voter (vote early, vote often, vote as ghost)!

LOL

We updated an old mainframe application twenty years ago. One of the data fields was the Social Security Number. We programmed it so you didn't have to put in the dashes, they would appear automatically. We were flooded with complaints from users who wanted to put in the dahses themselves. Go figure.

Years ago, the accounting system i worked with was the same way. You would enter telephone numbers, SSN's and even GL account numbers without any spaces, hyphens, etc.

A phone number would be entered as 9876543210

When it was time to display that number on a screen or print it on a form, there was the accompanying "display code" which formatted the number. I remember the display code for a phone number: "(XXX) XXX-XXXX" Thus the above number came out as: "(987) 654-3210". If one only used 7 digits, such as 6543210, it would be displayed as: "( ) 654-3210".

That system also had numeric display codes for such things as number of decimal places; thousands separator, suppression of leading zeroes, etc.

The original plans for Touch Tone included 4x4 keypad. The additional 4 buttons A,B,C,D were for command codes and would only be found on phone company employee phones. These tones were also a big part of the blue boxs used by phone phreaks. One of those tone was also recreated by the imfamous Capt. Crunch whisle.

There may also be military applications for the codes but I have no knowledge of that.

CAPTCHA CODG - The seventh cod catch of the day

"Illegitimi non carborundum"