real world columns: international standards

On a computer you can delete directories with reckless abandon. Whole tree structures of folders can be obliterated with just one multiple selection and a control key combination. It’s great fun but maybe a bit too powerful at times. Anyway, I have just been doing the real world equivalent; burning real world directories / folders on a real world bonfire, also great fun even if it lacks an undo function.

This may seem rather wasteful but there is a reason. I’ll start though with the filing cabinets I bought fifteen years ago from an American town planner. They were 50s styled, rounded corners, Cole Steel, just the right height for a desk top placed on top of them; absolutely perfect. There was only one slight, minor, tiny drawback; they were for paper of the American ‘letter’ size and here in the UK we use ‘A4’ which is a slight, minor, tiny bit bigger. I tried A4 paper in the drawers and they fitted … but only just. So I bought the cabinets. It was a bit like when you find a great pair of second-hand shoes that are just that incy-wincy bit too small, you kid yourself they fit and then spend the next month walking around with curled up toes and blisters. Well I kidded myself about the Cole Steel cabinets and spent the next month with A4 paper that was always slightly crumpled at the edges.

Eventually, I could stand it no more and while living in Holland I switched to European sizes. Faced with a choice of A4 or the larger folio, I chose folio having had more than enough of curled edges. I built up a large collection of information (partly through a policy of never throwing anything out!) and when I returned to the UK I took all the files with me.

On purchasing a filing cabinet to hold all the files I discovered that the UK, like Holland, has two sizes. Unfortunately they are not the same two sizes, we have the choice between A4 or something called foolscap. (I’m still unsure what a cap for a fool has got to do with paper, but there you go!) So I paid my money, got my cabinets, re-filed everything in foolscap sized files and burnt the Dutch folders on the bonfire.

Such international compatibility horror stories are not new. It’s not just a paper thing, it covers many other facets of life and it usually crops up at the least expected moment. Everybody knows about light bulbs and electrical plugs. I know I spent my first year in Holland with English plugs on all my appliances and just one plug adapter so that I could only plug one thing in at a time. Having breakfast resembled working in an old style telephone exchange with all the pluggings and un-pluggings necessary to get toast and tea and listen to the radio.

The dangerous things are the more unexpected things. Like the video recorder. It turns out that there is some strange difference in the video signals between the UK and Holland. Meaning that our Dutch video recorder wouldn’t work in the UK. The bad usability of this video recorder was the subject of a previous Real World column so I was not sad to see it go. However, at the last minute I decided against putting it on the bonfire and instead gave it to a Dutch colleague.

For the majority of readers living in America, the information here about discrepancies within Europe will not be of much use for those of you traveling abroad. You will sadly be left to discover your own examples! But don’t worry, when they do come along you can be sure that they will be as unexpected and illogical as the examples here, and you’ll always end up putting something on the bonfire.

The final example is by far the worst and most unexpected compatibility problem. It involves computer software (of course). Not quite as grand as the glitch that crashed NASA’s Mars probe but nearly so. A company I once worked for had English and Dutch employees, using English and Dutch versions of a well known spreadsheet program that excelled in most things, but not compatibility. They used the different versions of the program to add figures to one central spreadsheet file (it’s called ‘increased efficiency through file sharing’). The only glitch was in the visual format of the figures. The English values had a comma as a thousand separator (so; 1,000) while the Dutch values had a dot (so; 1.000). It looked messy but we could live with it. Imagine our horror four or five months down the line when we discovered that there was more to it that just looking messy. The columns being built up in the spreadsheet were actually wrong. The spreadsheet involved automatic column totals and it turned out that these total values only included the values in the English format, all the Dutch values in the columns were ignored, no error messages, nothing! No wonder our accounts looked bleak; we were only counting the values inputted by half the staff, had it been totals of money going out instead of coming in we might even have gone bankrupt.

Now, what’s the software equivalent of a bonfire?