Your government in action!

Today, I had to go on the Social Security website to make an address correction. The whole thing I had to change was my street address, which is exactly this long:

555 East Laaa Cnnnnnna Drive

This turns out to be too long for the address field! I had to shorten "East" to "E" and "Drive" to "Dr", without even any periods.

What is wrong with the U.S. Government's web designers? Is there a reason they can't deal with the real world?

It's things like this that make me really sympathetic for a friend I had in high school. His name (not kidding) was Aristotele Poppatriandaphilopolis​. Try fitting that on some stupid computer form!

What ever bureaucrat named your street will fit right in in Washington D.C.

Come on; everyone knows that Greeks don't use computers

That is what happens when you have a website built with no, concious design or testing involved in the process. It's unfortunate and infuriating. They, likely, subcontracted the building of the website out to a second party, who then outsourced the work and didn't give the folks building it much more direction than "build it".

My local bank got sold, I had to change banks. Social security told me it takes 2 months for them to change the routing on my monthly payment. 2 months to open my account and type in a new number?

Doncha just love government efficiency?

Your government inaction. Fixed.

E is pretty universal for "East" for any address. So is Dr for "Drive." Not Doctor.

What's really the issue here? Just trying to find something be mad about or secretly instigating some tirade against "dem liberals!"?

Here:

555 E Laaa Cnnnnnna Dr.

Anybody with an IQ higher than a doorknob knows that E is East and Dr is Drive.

I wonder what the outrage would be if the gvt spent the money to upgrade all the hardware and paid the license fees to upgrade all the software of all the computers in use by the fed today.

Kanye wrote in post #16547704
E is pretty universal for "East" for any address. So is Dr for "Drive." Not Doctor.

What's really the issue here? Just trying to find something be mad about or secretly instigating some tirade against "dem liberals!"?

Here:

555 E Laaa Cnnnnnna Dr.

Anybody with an IQ higher than a doorknob knows that E is East and Dr is Drive.

The use of "E" for "East" and "Dr" for "Drive" is not the issue. The issue is the paucity of characters allowed for a street address. There are a multitude of addresses longer than mine, none of which will fit in the space allowed without sometimes severe abbreviation. The space allowed by the SSA is 22 characters (including spaces). That means that the person who lives at the following real address (taken from my local phone book) cannot fit it on the form without using a non-standard abbreviation on at least one of the primary words of his street address:

7637 N Kansas Settlement Rd (27 characters)

And, interestingly, neither can the person who lives at this Washington, DC, street address:

1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW (24 characters)

The number of characters allowed for a street address should be of a length sufficient for any reasonable address. It is not. And that is the issue.

And, as a courtesy, I'll leave I.Q.s out of it.

Most likely, they are using an antiquated database from the 90s, as the cost to upgrade it will be just too high.

Aside from greed, the best explanation for government behavior is incompetence.

Careful, OP's point is quite valid -- why would anyone design a system such that reality won't fit in?

They're either stupid or liars, and that's a distinction without a difference here. My choice is stupid.

S.Horton wrote in post #16551215
Careful, OP's point is quite valid -- why would anyone design a system such that reality won't fit in?

They're either stupid or liars, and that's a distinction without a difference here. My choice is stupid.

K.... I guess I can add to this...

So I write software used by the government. My hypothesis of why this seemingly ridiculous error can occur has to do with my understanding of why the health care website bombed. There are zillions of reasons why, some of which not appropriate to be discussed here, but in general it all comes down to trying to within your budget, that is the budget dictated by the taxes you pay and how our politicians and military allocate them.

Thirty years ago the largest hard drives a consumer might have would be 20mb. That's it. And though they aren't used today the government does still use some software dating back that far. Specifically databases generally have static sizes for fields and decades ago having a text field length long enough to hold all addresses probably would be too slow to query and would probably take up too much space.

Yes they should rewrite all legacy software. But they won't. You will not be willing to pay the price. Think of how many times you or your friends have voted against raising taxes.

And then the other humongous problem--one reason why obamas site failed him. Because the government likes to keep projects separate from each other. It's as if different pieces were produced for totally different customers though ultimately it all goes back to our government. So a website allowing you to enter an address has to work with dozens of other sites or databases that were not designed to work together. So u get something so weird like this because it's just the common demonator.

Anyway that's my theory based on my experience dealing with similar things.

^^ It bombed because of who worked on it, and since we're in the same business, you know exactly what I mean.