We know stereotypes are poor placeholders for reality. Still, if we name a few nations, there are certain traits and themes that come to mind. Americans are fat, loud, gregarious, and love making pointless smalltalk. The English are reserved, love tea, and have perfected the art of queuing. The French are snobbish, the Japanese have weaponized politeness, the Finns won’t stand within ten meters of another human being at the bus stop, and so on. They can range from harmless to downright offensive and demeaning.

Laurent is Canadian, working for an insurance company. Their software is Russian- in that it comes from a Russian vendor, with a support contract that gives them access to a Russian dev team to make changes. While reviewing commits, Laurent found one simply labeled: “Fix some Sonars issue”.

The change?

public enum CorrespondenceDeliveryMethods {
    MAIL("mail"),
    NOT_MAIL("moose");
}

Apparently, the Russian team has some stereotypes of their own about how documents are sent in Canada. Laurent adds:

Since this saved in the database and would thus imply 5 signatures to do a data migration, it is quite probable we’ll ultimately leave it as is. Which is a shame, because as we all know, the alternative to mail in Canada is to ask a Hockey player to slapshot the letter through the customer window, especially after they canceled their home insurance with us.


They should send a real Canadian hero
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