ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades Your national date format

The Irish Post Office, An Post operates the most extensive post office network I've seen anywhere and it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify it although any attempts to roll it back results in major protests, particularly in rural areas.

The Post offices, recently re-branded "postshop(tm)" actually provide a lot of services here other than mail:

1) Mail / fast package delivery
2) Post Office Bank
3) Full social welfare system access, including welfare payments are done through the post offices.
4) AIB (our largest retail bank) offers full banking service over the counter in any post office.
5) Bill payment, they accept payment for almost every conceivable bill.
6) Travel agency and booking system for a number of airlines, including Ryanair.
7) They own and operate the national lottery system.
8) Retail items: Stationary, cards, mobile phone top ups etc etc.
9) they also offer their own financial service products (insurance etc) and credit card.
10) the point of access for processing of passports if you don't want to go to the Passport Office and queue.

In order to keep the network of offices open they had to seriously step up the no of services.

The Post Office in Britain also handles many of these things: Girobank bank accounts, bill payments, cashing welfare checks, and so on, although in the latter case they are trying to force everybody into having payments made directly into an account.

The P.O. here also issues vehicle licenses (the disk attached to the windshield upon payment of the annual tax) and TV licenses. Along with the bill payments idea they also issue savings stamps for telephone, electricity, and TV licenses.

We also have the concept of the "Sub Post Office," which is generally a small area and counter set aside for the purpose within a small village store so that people have access to postal services while picking up other essential provisions.

Many of the smaller sub-Post Offices are gradually closing, leaving a lot of people without easy access to services, especially the elderly in rural areas without easy access to transport (public transport here has also become a joke, but that's another story!).

Yeah we've inherited the sub post office idea too. They're generally staying open and An Post is under HUGE politically pressure to keep them open. Most, but not all, are fully computerised and can thus offer the full range of services. Adding AIB (our largest bank) banking services and various other things has made them a lot more viable as AIB is desperate to roll back its own branch network and as the post office has fully computerised "bank-like" offices located at almost everywhere in the country the banks, credit card companies, airlines etc have seen them as a really cost effective way of providing proxy-branches. They've basically installed a very open & flexible computerised transaction system that can be set up to handle transactions for any third party via a simple touch screen interface and barcoding/swipe/smartcard readers. Any self-respecting "Post Master" or "Post Mistress" can handle it

They've also extended their reach by adding thousands of "PostPoints" which are basically easy to use POS terminals installed in small shops, supermarkets etc that give access to bill payment, lodgement and withdrawal from various banks (ATM card and PIN pad access only), mobile top up, basic postal services etc. So your average news agent or petrol station can accept payment for your Electricity bill via the post office system.

and "Billpay.ie" which is a fully integrated bill payment system. You register all of your bills (cable, phone, electricity, gas, credit cards, etc etc) and the system accesses the various companies databases, keeps you up to date with what's outstanding.. issues you with email reminders and accepts payment online as a single credit/debit card payment or with a swipe card at a post office / post point as cash/card/cheque. Basically a bill consolidation system.

They even went as far as rebranding as "Post TS" (TS = Transaction Services)

It was an ideal use for a huge retail network that was gradually becoming obsolete.

on the time format thing ... the public voicemail network is of French origin hence the "this message was left at 18 hours 23 from "name".. (dix-huit heures vingt trois.. written "18h23")
Cool system though, most people have a mailbox on the public network, so if you phone someone and leave a message it will go message from ""John Murphy", mailbox : 021 999 9999.. to reply press 88 to return a call press 89" etc..

Here in Austria Post Office bank, lottery, sale of A1 cell phones (Post, Telekom and Mobilkom are actually one company),...
Oh yes, they just started developing photos here.

In Canada we mostly use mm/dd/yy except Quebec(french) they use dd/mm/yy.
If you want to be able to sort them easy on a computer you should use YY/MM/DD. You don't need any special calcs for them to come in the proper order including year that way.
Many place use 4 digit year since 2000.

We used to have "Post Office Savings Banks",
when I was a young fella, they were closed down in 1985, along with a lot of the Post Offices that held them.
We now have what is called a Post Shop, that (obviously) sells stamps, but it also has a Bank(called Kiwi-Bank).
You can pay your power and phone bills there
and all manner of other bills, even Court fines!, if you must.
Talk about re-inventing the wheel!, we could have saved a whole heap of time and money, if we had just left it alone, at the start.

Hear hear! Doesn't that apply to just about everything in which the government gets involved?!

Reviving an old thread here, I scanned through this discussion about time and date formats, postal codes, etc. and realized that there is one other area we didn't cover earlier.

Here in Britain, along with just about every other English-speaking country, we use a period as a decimal point, e.g. 12.5 for twelve-and-a-half. We also commonly use a comma as a thousands separator, e.g. 12,500 for twelve thousand five hundred.

But most of you on the Continent do this the other way round, don't you? Every European paper I can ever recall seeing uses a comma for a decimal point and either a period or a space as a thousands separator.

Are there any countries in Continental Europe which don't adhere to this convention? It all seems very strange to those of us who grew up in Anglo-Saxon countries.


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 06-09-2003).]

We Swedes write 2,000 when the English speakers would have written 2.000 and 2 000 when they would have used 2,000

(Yes, specifying 2 down to the third decimal is rather unusual, but you sometimes find in lab reports and the like.)

I personally find 2.000 and 2 000 to be the easiest to read. Perhaps I can start my own system?