Comment On Similar to Snail Mail

Haha - nice

My favorite part is how the USPS, once responsible for efficient interpersonal communication, has turned into a government-subsidized advertisement delivery service.

I wonder if similar hilarious WTFs explain all the grammatical / spelling / logic errors in my Vi4gr4 spam e-mails?

Not to nerd out, but those grammatical, etc. errors are actually a case study in machine intelligence vs. human intelligence.

A human, reading those, can understand the meaning without difficulty. But a computer program, like, say, a spam filter, will have a much harder time determining the content of the message. Fascinating subject really.

</nerd>

>logic errors in my Vi4gr4 spam e-mails

Only if they start a Russian version: ЧтоF

The Nerve:

My favorite part is how the USPS, once responsible for efficient interpersonal communication, has turned into a government-subsidized advertisement delivery service.

The second part is common - this has happened to all postal services (well, all the three - US, UK, France - I've used, but...).

However, I'm going to contest your assertion that the USPS was responsible for *efficient* communication. No. Definitely not. Any service which routinely takes nearly a week to deliver a letter less than fifty miles away is not efficient. (And the introduction in the late 80s of a "priority" service costing nearly ten times as much didn't help - this one only took 2-3 days.) Compare to the Royal Mail (now somewhat emasculated due to political ideology), which routinely delivers ordinary 1st class post the next day almost anywhere in Great Britain.

Not a WTF. They were actually addressing mail to the superhero known as THE SLUG, but they don't know exactly where he lives, so they're sending mail to every address they can find.

Steve The Cynic:

The Nerve:

My favorite part is how the USPS, once responsible for efficient interpersonal communication, has turned into a government-subsidized advertisement delivery service.

The second part is common - this has happened to all postal services (well, all the three - US, UK, France - I've used, but...).

However, I'm going to contest your assertion that the USPS was responsible for *efficient* communication. No. Definitely not. Any service which routinely takes nearly a week to deliver a letter less than fifty miles away is not efficient. (And the introduction in the late 80s of a "priority" service costing nearly ten times as much didn't help - this one only took 2-3 days.) Compare to the Royal Mail (now somewhat emasculated due to political ideology), which routinely delivers ordinary 1st class post the next day almost anywhere in Great Britain.

You're kidding, right? Have you ever noticed how the US is about 20x bigger than the UK? I'm talking throughput here.

Steve The Cynic:

The Nerve:

My favorite part is how the USPS, once responsible for efficient interpersonal communication, has turned into a government-subsidized advertisement delivery service.

The second part is common - this has happened to all postal services (well, all the three - US, UK, France - I've used, but...).

However, I'm going to contest your assertion that the USPS was responsible for *efficient* communication. No. Definitely not. Any service which routinely takes nearly a week to deliver a letter less than fifty miles away is not efficient. (And the introduction in the late 80s of a "priority" service costing nearly ten times as much didn't help - this one only took 2-3 days.) Compare to the Royal Mail (now somewhat emasculated due to political ideology), which routinely delivers ordinary 1st class post the next day almost anywhere in Great Britain.

You may not have noticed, but the UK is smaller than many of our states (we have 50).

To THE SLUG

Hi, Frisco.

MP (real):

You may not have noticed, but the UK is smaller than many of our states (we have 50).

Better comparison would be Canada (similar east/west geography). Canada Post generally runs 3-4 day service anywhere in the country. (One day to get to nearest major depot, one day to travel to next major depot, one day to destination, extra day in case of missed connections).

Whatever happened to actually understanding your requirements? Personally speaking, I would be in big trouble if I had blindly implemented this requirement without questioning "so why do we have a requirement that explicitly insults users?".

The practice of handing over a requirement spec for some code monkey to blindly implemement is utterly flawed. It's cargo-cult at best - implement what you see without ever trying to understand what you are implementing or why.

I heard a story, perhaps just a legend, that a guy working at a bank was testing a mail merge and created an account with the name "Rich Bastard" to test it, and ended up sending exclusive private offers addressed to "Mr. Rich Bastard".

Steve The Cynic:

The Nerve:

My favorite part is how the USPS, once responsible for efficient interpersonal communication, has turned into a government-subsidized advertisement delivery service.

The second part is common - this has happened to all postal services (well, all the three - US, UK, France - I've used, but...).

However, I'm going to contest your assertion that the USPS was responsible for *efficient* communication. No. Definitely not. Any service which routinely takes nearly a week to deliver a letter less than fifty miles away is not efficient. (And the introduction in the late 80s of a "priority" service costing nearly ten times as much didn't help - this one only took 2-3 days.) Compare to the Royal Mail (now somewhat emasculated due to political ideology), which routinely delivers ordinary 1st class post the next day almost anywhere in Great Britain.

Have you actually sent anything via 1st class recently? It takes up to a week: they downgraded it when they introduced 'Special Delivery' so that people would opt to pay even more to get things on time.

That's why you hardly ever recieve parcels via Royal Mail anymore, it's almost always cheaper to use a private delivery firm once you factor in insurance and delivery speed. Someone wrote a great article about that kind of thing (Possibly either Spolsky or Atwood), but I've forgotten exactly who, so I can't post a link.

Also, Second Class is now hilariously slow, you might as well walk to the recipient's house and give it them in person.

People need to click on "THE SLUG" in the second attempt addresses...

The Nerve:

Steve The Cynic:

The Nerve:

My favorite part is how the USPS, once responsible for efficient interpersonal communication, has turned into a government-subsidized advertisement delivery service.

The second part is common - this has happened to all postal services (well, all the three - US, UK, France - I've used, but...).

However, I'm going to contest your assertion that the USPS was responsible for *efficient* communication. No. Definitely not. Any service which routinely takes nearly a week to deliver a letter less than fifty miles away is not efficient. (And the introduction in the late 80s of a "priority" service costing nearly ten times as much didn't help - this one only took 2-3 days.) Compare to the Royal Mail (now somewhat emasculated due to political ideology), which routinely delivers ordinary 1st class post the next day almost anywhere in Great Britain.

You're kidding, right? Have you ever noticed how the US is about 20x bigger than the UK? I'm talking throughput here.

He also specified delivering the mail to somewhere 50 miles away. As small as the UK is, it's a lot bigger than 50 miles.

So, Reggie, you're in "the industry," maybe you can help me:

There's a house in my neighborhood that has the same house number as mine, and we're always getting their mail. The other day we even got the poor guy's citizenship papers. I'm lazy, so I don't like running the mail over to them, but the mailman insists on getting the mail mixed up anyway.

So tell me Reggie, Mr. Postal Expert... what's up with that?

It could've been worse. They could've addressed it to "THE STIG".

Anonymous:

Whatever happened to actually understanding your requirements? Personally speaking, I would be in big trouble if I had blindly implemented this requirement without questioning "so why do we have a requirement that explicitly insults users?".

The practice of handing over a requirement spec for some code monkey to blindly implemement is utterly flawed. It's cargo-cult at best - implement what you see without ever trying to understand what you are implementing or why.

Yeah, but that's what management likes. For a while I tried to interpret the needs of my users, but then I realized that if I was really as interested as they are in selling toilet paper, then I would be a toilet paper salesman. In my experience, all individual thought is punished, so I implement exactly what is asked for and I can never be blamed for flawed logic.

Now that I think about it, I actually learned this lesson before in high school working at Dairy Queen. The manager insisted on a specific spelling of a promotion on the sign. The spelling was wrong, and when I put the letters up, I corrected it. No amount of arguing could convince her that spelling it correctly was better than "her way," though, and I had to go out and redo the job, spelling it incorrectly.

jiteo:

People need to click on "THE SLUG" in the second attempt addresses...

More unicorns!!!

Anonymous:

The practice of handing over a requirement spec for some code monkey to blindly implemement is utterly flawed. It's cargo-cult at best - implement what you see without ever trying to understand what you are implementing or why.

Not that surprising. We have a generation of developers who are learning their craft by cutting-and-pasting code they find on the internet into their application without understanding what it does. The chuckle-head who implemented that probably posted to Experts Exchange for code on how to do it and then pasted the answer they got directly into the application.

Ed:

Steve The Cynic:

The Nerve:

My favorite part is how the USPS, once responsible for efficient interpersonal communication, has turned into a government-subsidized advertisement delivery service.

The second part is common - this has happened to all postal services (well, all the three - US, UK, France - I've used, but...).

However, I'm going to contest your assertion that the USPS was responsible for *efficient* communication. No. Definitely not. Any service which routinely takes nearly a week to deliver a letter less than fifty miles away is not efficient. (And the introduction in the late 80s of a "priority" service costing nearly ten times as much didn't help - this one only took 2-3 days.) Compare to the Royal Mail (now somewhat emasculated due to political ideology), which routinely delivers ordinary 1st class post the next day almost anywhere in Great Britain.

Have you actually sent anything via 1st class recently? It takes up to a week: they downgraded it when they introduced 'Special Delivery' so that people would opt to pay even more to get things on time.

That's why you hardly ever recieve parcels via Royal Mail anymore, it's almost always cheaper to use a private delivery firm once you factor in insurance and delivery speed. Someone wrote a great article about that kind of thing (Possibly either Spolsky or Atwood), but I've forgotten exactly who, so I can't post a link.

Also, Second Class is now hilariously slow, you might as well walk to the recipient's house and give it them in person.

I still get 1st class mail within a couple of days of it being posted, usually within one...

Actually, this is not the case. (I work for a company that writes software that mailers use to get stuff through the postal system.) The USPS is required to be self funding. That's why we have stamps, and why the price of stamps keeps going up. If it was paid for by taxes, why would you have to have a stamp? For better or worse, the junk mail (sorry for using that term, boss, if you read this) is what's keeping the postal system funded and alive. They're talking about moving to a 5 day a week delivery because they're not making their numbers. Now, I don't like getting 10 credit card solicitations a week, but at least I get mail on Saturdays. So I guess you have to decide what trade-offs you're willing to live with.

Ed:

Steve The Cynic:

The Nerve:

My favorite part is how the USPS, once responsible for efficient interpersonal communication, has turned into a government-subsidized advertisement delivery service.

The second part is common - this has happened to all postal services (well, all the three - US, UK, France - I've used, but...).

However, I'm going to contest your assertion that the USPS was responsible for *efficient* communication. No. Definitely not. Any service which routinely takes nearly a week to deliver a letter less than fifty miles away is not efficient. (And the introduction in the late 80s of a "priority" service costing nearly ten times as much didn't help - this one only took 2-3 days.) Compare to the Royal Mail (now somewhat emasculated due to political ideology), which routinely delivers ordinary 1st class post the next day almost anywhere in Great Britain.

Have you actually sent anything via 1st class recently? It takes up to a week: they downgraded it when they introduced 'Special Delivery' so that people would opt to pay even more to get things on time.

That's why you hardly ever recieve parcels via Royal Mail anymore, it's almost always cheaper to use a private delivery firm once you factor in insurance and delivery speed. Someone wrote a great article about that kind of thing (Possibly either Spolsky or Atwood), but I've forgotten exactly who, so I can't post a link.

Also, Second Class is now hilariously slow, you might as well walk to the recipient's house and give it them in person.

Well, I remember using first class for not-guaranteed-but-routinely-that-way next-day delivery, and Special Delivery for guaranteed-but-occasionally-not-on-time next-day delivery as recently as a couple of years ago. In fact, I had more late Special Delivery letters than delayed ordinary first class, both before and after the change from before-12 to before-9/before-1pm.

Agree on Second Class, though.

If it is checked, 'THE SLUG' will be used.

In my opinion, anyone who abuses quotation marks deserves what they get. It's a major pet peeve that some people like to put 'quotation marks' everywhere for 'no darn reason.' They're usually the people who misuse apostrophes too!

The Nerve:

My favorite part is how the USPS, once responsible for efficient interpersonal communication, has turned into a government-subsidized advertisement delivery service.

Actually it's the other way around -- for the privilege of delivering junk mail, the mailers are required to either do all the work of sorting and coding for the USPS before handing it over, pay bulk rates high enough to more than pay the cost of delivery, or some in-between combination.

The net effect is that junk mail subsidizes, rather than being subsidized by, other classes of mail.

Stop it! Your comments are starting to make me think positives about Australia Post, which simply isn't allowed (and yes the country sizes compare nicely.

This reminds me of a time when I was testing a new mass customer email system in a real rush. I tested it once, then went to send it to everyone (10K customers) but hadn't saved the text.
No probs, I'll copy it from the test email I received.

Sure enough all emails started with:
Dear <real customer name>
Dear <my real name>

TRWTF is paying extra for a pre-release software (which normally is given for free as beta version) and blindly using its output without even a short look at it.

The real FAIL is working at a place that sells personal data, most probably without consent or with swindled consent.

The Nerve:

My favorite part is how the USPS, once responsible for efficient interpersonal communication, has turned into a government-subsidized advertisement delivery service.

Umm, the government does NOT subsidize the post office. At least not in the US.

As for others comments on 1st class mail, I find that I generally get it with 1 day if it's within 50-100 miles and 2-3 days tops if its beyond that. Not bad really.

boog:

So, Reggie, you're in "the industry," maybe you can help me:

There's a house in my neighborhood that has the same house number as mine, and we're always getting their mail. The other day we even got the poor guy's citizenship papers. I'm lazy, so I don't like running the mail over to them, but the mailman insists on getting the mail mixed up anyway.

So tell me Reggie, Mr. Postal Expert... what's up with that?

Easy! Remove the number from your house, and affix a notice with a house name. Have him do the same. Use the house name instead of house number from now on.

Steve:

Actually, this is not the case. (I work for a company that writes software that mailers use to get stuff through the postal system.) The USPS is required to be self funding. That's why we have stamps, and why the price of stamps keeps going up. If it was paid for by taxes, why would you have to have a stamp? For better or worse, the junk mail (sorry for using that term, boss, if you read this) is what's keeping the postal system funded and alive. They're talking about moving to a 5 day a week delivery because they're not making their numbers. Now, I don't like getting 10 credit card solicitations a week, but at least I get mail on Saturdays. So I guess you have to decide what trade-offs you're willing to live with.

Sorry. I was referring to the fact that the USPS borrows money from the government in order to meet its basic expenses, and if you think they're going to pay that money back, I'll laugh you off this forum.

If I got to choose how many days of the week I get mail, I would choose 0. I get about 4 valid pieces of mail per year. My relatives email me, any bills or statements I get are online, and anytime I have something delivered, it comes FedEx or UPS. For the 4 times a year I get mail, I wouldn't mind dropping by a local post office and picking it up.

I'd say 1st class mail in the UK gets there next day 90% of the time. Even when I send it the full length of the country to the darkest depths of Cornwall.

Steven:

If it is checked, 'THE SLUG' will be used.

In my opinion, anyone who abuses quotation marks deserves what they get. It's a major pet peeve that some people like to put 'quotation marks' everywhere for 'no darn reason.' They're usually the people who misuse apostrophe's too!

FTFY

I missed frist post, damnit! Somebody is spamming my inbox like crazy!

Steve:

Actually, this is not the case. (I work for a company that writes software that mailers use to get stuff through the postal system.) The USPS is required to be self funding. That's why we have stamps, and why the price of stamps keeps going up. If it was paid for by taxes, why would you have to have a stamp? For better or worse, the junk mail (sorry for using that term, boss, if you read this) is what's keeping the postal system funded and alive. They're talking about moving to a 5 day a week delivery because they're not making their numbers. Now, I don't like getting 10 credit card solicitations a week, but at least I get mail on Saturdays. So I guess you have to decide what trade-offs you're willing to live with.

"Subsidized by" does not (necessarily) mean "funded entirely by".

Regardless, yes; the USPS has not been directly funded by the government since the reorganization in the 80s, and it seems decreasing mail volume is squeezing their budget. But, it also seems they have some sizable loans from the U.S. Treasury to help balance the short-term.

So, the USPS does not get items to their recipients within 2-3 days. That makes them inefficient?

Name any other entity that can take a small physical item and deliver it to any one*** of 300 million people, many of them thousands of miles away, for less than half a dollar.

Sure - across town may take longer than you want, but think about it - East Coast to West Coast for under a dollar. You can't beat that.

*** In a perfect world, that "any one" would be the one person you specify. In boog's situation, I suppose it becomes "anyone"...

The Nerve:

My favorite part is how the USPS, once responsible for efficient interpersonal communication, has turned into a government-subsidized advertisement delivery service.

Bulk presorted junk mail creates an enormous profit for the USPS, actually; it's first class mail (e.g. the stuff you actually want to send and receive) that operates at a loss.

Caffeine:

Stop it! Your comments are starting to make me think positives about Australia Post, which simply isn't allowed (and yes the country sizes compare nicely.

This reminds me of a time when I was testing a new mass customer email system in a real rush. I tested it once, then went to send it to everyone (10K customers) but hadn't saved the text.
No probs, I'll copy it from the test email I received.

Sure enough all emails started with:
Dear <real customer name>
Dear <my real name>

I once consulted for a company (on a different project thankfully) that managed to send a fax to all its customers:

Dear <<insert Customer name>>

This letter is to let you know that Imedoia Version <<insert version # here>> is Y2K compliant.

I'm sure the customers were greatly reassured.

Captcha: iusto: When having gusto is too much work.

Alex:

It could've been worse. They could've addressed it to "THE STIG".

Some say that he delivers junkmail at the speed of 200 miles per hour. Others, that he clear-cuts forests to make the cheap paper. All we know is that he's called THE STIG!

100% the developer’s fault.

When he was coding that feature and realized there was no “default text” text supplied to replace “THE SLUG” he should have asked for more detail.

Saying there was no requirement so I assumed addressing all their customers as “THE SLUG” was an appropriate solution would put any Business-to-Business operation out of business.


“The requirements didn’t specify an admin address for the ‘contact info’ so I made one up.”

“You didn’t include a photo for the company president’s profile, so I used one I found on Google”

“You weren’t clear what to do with the deleted files so I trashed them without a recovery option”

“You didn’t list a technical support phone number so I put 911”

I mean, when it is obvious that missing information is going to cause a severe problem (and I could tell after the first paragraph there would be one, even without access to the actual requirements) it is the developer and/or development team that needs to go to the client and say- your requirements are incomplete and we need more info.

Anonymous:

Whatever happened to actually understanding your requirements? Personally speaking, I would be in big trouble if I had blindly implemented this requirement without questioning "so why do we have a requirement that explicitly insults users?".

The practice of handing over a requirement spec for some code monkey to blindly implemement is utterly flawed. It's cargo-cult at best - implement what you see without ever trying to understand what you are implementing or why.

1. See screwy requirement
2. Implement as written
3. Deliver to customer
4. 'Oh, you didnt want it o work like that?. Let me just work out a quote for you based on your revised requirements...'
5. KerChing.

Steve:

Actually, this is not the case. (I work for a company that writes software that mailers use to get stuff through the postal system.) The USPS is required to be self funding. That's why we have stamps, and why the price of stamps keeps going up. If it was paid for by taxes, why would you have to have a stamp?

It used to both be supported by tax dollars AND require stamps. To answer your question: why not get you coming AND going? E.g.: interstate highways (paid for taxes) that have tolls (paid by the drivers).

The Nerve:

My favorite part is how the USPS, once responsible for efficient interpersonal communication, has turned into a government-subsidized advertisement delivery service.

The USPS has been self-sufficient since the 1980s. They receive subsidies only for costs due to disabled and overseas voters.

prionic6:

The real FAIL is working at a place that sells personal data, most probably without consent or with swindled consent.

Except that selling a service that does mail merging using publicly available name and address data hardly counts as an invasion of privacy - the information has been made freely and publicly available in phone books for years. There's nothing wrong with buying (or selling) access to a digital copy of the information provided by those books.

WTF 1: nobody double-checking the requirements to make sure that they entirely satisfy the user's needs/demands/requests (this should have been part of the requirements gathering process and was the cause of the great failure in the article). When the process is properly streamlined for a large organization, there's nothing wrong with a process saying to implement and test the requirements exactly as specified. If the requirements were wrong and never corrected then that 'bug'(feature) will propagate all the way through to the end product.
WTF 2 (TRWTF): The company getting the pre-release (read: beta) copy and not double and triple-checking its output before mailing it (I trust that company and everything they do, and I'm sure that their software never has bugs because they told me so).

FTW: Reggie's mother getting junk mail from the company using the pre-release version.

Hey, has somebody been getting all my mail?

jiteo:

People need to click on "THE SLUG" in the second attempt addresses...

Yeah... um, what is with all the unicorns? Is there an inside joke I missed?

Steven:

If it is checked, 'THE SLUG' will be used.

In my opinion, anyone who abuses quotation marks deserves what they get. It's a major pet peeve that some people like to put 'quotation marks' everywhere for 'no darn reason.' They're usually the people who misuse apostrophes too!

It also says "(see screenshot)". Perhaps the screenshot showed "THE SLUG", too?

The Nerve:

Anonymous:

Whatever happened to actually understanding your requirements? Personally speaking, I would be in big trouble if I had blindly implemented this requirement without questioning "so why do we have a requirement that explicitly insults users?".

The practice of handing over a requirement spec for some code monkey to blindly implemement is utterly flawed. It's cargo-cult at best - implement what you see without ever trying to understand what you are implementing or why.

Yeah, but that's what management likes. For a while I tried to interpret the needs of my users, but then I realized that if I was really as interested as they are in selling toilet paper, then I would be a toilet paper salesman. In my experience, all individual thought is punished, so I implement exactly what is asked for and I can never be blamed for flawed logic.

Now that I think about it, I actually learned this lesson before in high school working at Dairy Queen. The manager insisted on a specific spelling of a promotion on the sign. The spelling was wrong, and when I put the letters up, I corrected it. No amount of arguing could convince her that spelling it correctly was better than "her way," though, and I had to go out and redo the job, spelling it incorrectly.

I had that experience at age 10 when a teacher marked me down in a spelling test for "Belgium" not "Belguim". No amound of arguing with her could convince her it was actually spelt "Belgium", and she refused to look at the atlas I waved at her. I ended the day standing in disgrace outside the headmaster's office. Everybody else in the class kept very quiet about their own marked-down spellings.

Tom Woolf:

Sure - across town may take longer than you want, but think about it - East Coast to West Coast for under a dollar. You can't beat that.

Even if you are mailing across town, sure if you've got nothing better to do you could drive over there yourself and hand the item directly to the recipient and that would be faster, but I've got other shit to do. Sending a letter is asynchronous, it's spawning the task off to another thread!