A system failure I predicted some two years ago finally occurred.

A couple of years ago we got our official house number from the local government. It was not what I expected. Our house is near number 1. I expected to get 1A. I asked for more – I wanted 0, but I knew that would fuck up the whole government geographical software system. 1A would have been fine, though not as sexy.

What we got was 3. It was recycled. Before we built our house there was a ruin, hidden under vegetation, that had number 3. It's 700 metres away from us. If I hadn't looked on the geodesic maps, I wouldn't have known about it.

So a few days ago something we expected didn't get delivered. No such place.

We're not monsters – we don't want our delivery people to drive 6 kilometres over a ruined dirt road . They know they can drop off our stuff in the small store in a nearby village. A few years ago I had a fight about this with one of our neighbours. He was mad at me for not forcing delivery people to drive to our house. He said we were spoiling them. Fuck the spoiled bastard.

But this time it was a temp doing the delivery, and they tried their best. Which means using Google Maps. Which totally suck in our area (yes we put in a ticket today, no idea how soon Google will fix this). But they didn't call us.

OSM has two entries for number 3 in our village. One is nine years old and wrong. The other is one year old and correct.. Fortunately no one here, except for me, uses OSM. I tried editing OSM years ago and got burned – despite my best efforts (than included buying a stand-alone GPS) my edit was rejected.

We will have to wait a couple of days now for whatever was coming to us. Today the regular delivery person dropped off something else at the village store. The system is working again. But now I think that any government, local or not, that carelessly reuses unique identifiers, should be defenestrated ASAP.

#RuralRoads