Last of a Breed: Postal Workers Who Decipher Bad Addresses

Re:Last of a Breed: Postal Workers Who Decipher Bad Addresses by fsckin on Saturday May 04, 2013 @05:34AM (#5654566)

Russians have us beat -- they decoded an address with the wrong character encoding hand written on this package.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Koverto-kun-krakozjab...

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Re:Last of a Breed: Postal Workers Who Decipher Bad Addresses by ivan78 on Saturday May 04, 2013 @07:59AM (#5654778)

I immediately remembered about this story too. This is pretty hilarious:

"Containing a Harry Potter book, the letter was sent to a Russian student by her French friend, who manually transcribed the address that he had received by e-mail. The Frenchman's e-mail program was not set up correctly, so the Cyrillic characters encoded as KOI8-R were instead displayed as diacritic symbols from the Western character set (ISO-8859-1). Russian postal employees deciphered the address and delivered the package successfully."

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Re:Last of a Breed: Postal Workers Who Decipher Bad Addresses by jjs on Saturday May 04, 2013 @08:11AM (#5654803)

Either that, or they've spent so much time on the pre-Unicode Internet that they can sight-read Cyrillic characters encoded as Latin-1...

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Re:Last of a Breed: Postal Workers Who Decipher Bad Addresses by forinti on Saturday May 04, 2013 @03:09PM (#5655969)

Maybe the Russian postal service has a good crypto team as a remnant of the soviet era.

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