Luckily my application only has to work in Canada and the US.

Sometimes one of my customers will ship to Mexico, and I just don’t validate those addresses because they’re a nightmare.

Do you know of a great validator for the UK? My validation provider offers international validation but I just don’t trust that it’s accurate and take it on a country by country basis.

Well, unlike postal addresses, email addresses have an easier way to validate them. OTPs.
But that needs to be implemented on the application side

I often wonder how it is that we have these many people employed

Depends. I had a job at a hotel once that for the first 3 years we didn't have this one piece of annoying software. Never had an issue with counting money. Never had an issue with keeping track of dirty rooms.

Then we got this new software, and it wanted you to change your password every week to keep it secure.

After a month I couldn't even remember what it was this week. So we took to writing down our passwords and taping them to the monitor bezel. Now this super secure policy for password management became infinitely INSECURE, because I, an hourly part time employee, had access to the owners portal. I could log in as him, change my pay rate to $300 an hour. Which I did. I told him "I will show you why this system is the worst idea you've ever had." He didn't believe me, and 2 weeks later my part time check was higher than the salary general managers.

He asked how I did it, I said I used his account to change my pay roll. So he stopped putting HIS password up, and only made us put our passwords up.

So the next night, I logged into the managers account. I switched every single room as dirty. While keeping a paper list of what rooms are clean.

Then I left for the day. When I came back the next day they said they were having issues with the software, and doing everything the old way now.

Not exactly how I meant to accomplish the job. I figured there was going to be several more steps, after they figured out what happened. I just didn't count on them not figuring it out. So I just went with it, and nobody had to remember passwords anymore because I caused chaos for 2 weeks.

We have a service at work that rejects my password about 75% of the time. Yesterday, didn't work, today it works. Pretty sure it's an active directory issue.

I rolled my own. I love but hate it, so many hacks to make quoting work. My goal is that you enter the information and it figures out the annoying shit itself (overlength fees, residential/hospital, etc).

There’s one carrier where I have to look up if it’s an Amazon warehouse and if so do a ton of crazy math to calculate the fee (since these 90s SOAP APIs don’t calculate shit for you).

Ha! Been there, done that. You’ll find that they’ll continue to find ways to trick the system.

Now I get input like “*PRO”, so I have to block any string that starts with any non-alpha characters stripped + pro (case insensitive). You’d think you could just strip out all non-digits and match “pro,” but some carriers actually have letters so next you try to match any string starting with “pro” (case insensitive) after already stripping out non-alpha characters, but then you’re screwed if the string contains the letters P, R, O at all.

It’s a cat and mouse game, but it wouldn’t have to be if people would use their brain to understand the system doesn’t need you to tell it which field you’re entering when it’s clearly labeled already—just use your brain and input the correct fucking data.

But more to your point, you’re right. I let users input phone numbers however they damn well please and if I can’t standardize the formats and figure it out then finally I can show an error but 95% of the time that’s not the case.

Brian knew the Old Ways. Without Brian, we are lost.

So, side story. Management at my old company wanted a dick-wagging screen in the office lobby. Literally just a graphic with the company logo and impressive sales numbers. Problem: they didn't want some random box having access to actual data. Fair. So the workaround was a static program that literally started from X and incremented by whatever values. And once or twice a year someone had to dig the airgapped PC out of a network closet and replace the exe via flash drive if the imaginary numbers got too incredulous. Brain dead simple procedure, well documented... and people still fucked it up.

By the time I left that TV was just playing fox business all day.

Maybe? If it’s a franchise. But that is still solid B territory. Changing the files would be much less obvious

Wouldn’t that get caught by the accountants when the receipts don’t match up?

Yea, but i also notice that these type of screens display the same image day and night for years, and it’s a bad look for the burnt in lower price to shadow the new one, and at that point stickers or replacing the whole tv is the only fix