Trivial things that make you annoyed beyond expectations?

[ebikeerwidnes]

Wouldn't have been on the outskirts of Liverpool this call centre by any chance?

Yes - to the North a bit along the coast
I actually worked in the centre of Liverpool - that call centre was in Crosby and was the nearest to us
so I went there quite often at certain points in my career there

 

[icowden]

One of my first jobs in IT was to "sanitise" the customer database of postcode starting with SO
it was often entered as S0 and that caused the letters to be sorted in the wromg order
and hence the Post Office charged us a lot extra rather than the huge discount for pre sorted mail

High Five - I did the exact same thing but with patient health records in preparation for linking to the NHS spine.
I also had to perform a lot of filtering and fixing of postcodes - including SO and many other combinations. The number of UPDATE queries just grew and grew.

 

[ebikeerwidnes]

High Five - I did the exact same thing but with patient health records in preparation for linking to the NHS spine.
I also had to perform a lot of filtering and fixing of postcodes - including SO and many other combinations. The number of UPDATE queries just grew and grew.

I was doing this in about 1982 - and on a "database" that was more of a custom file system accessed by routines written in-house in assembler

and only accessible in COBOL68

why was a rather rude introduction to the world of programming
(and I could "entertain" you with stories about how it got worse for hours!!"

so UPDATE queries would have been a massive luxury at the time!!