The world according to Barclaycard

A letter in the Guardian pointed me to a competition being run by Barclaycard (a UK credit card company) to win an Aston Martin car, coinciding with the release of the newest James Bond film.

The terms and conditions take the term "geographically challenged" to new heights.



The United Kingdom, for the record, is the island of Great Britain with its islands, and Northern Ireland. If Barclaycard had wished to exclude Northern Ireland they could have used the term "Great Britain". "ROI" (Republic of Ireland) has been an independent nation for getting on for a century, and The Channel Islands are not now, and never have been, part of the United Kingdom.

One wonders, though, what the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight have done to upset Barclaycard!

GRC Database Information, welcome to the club!

Yes, inevitably.

After creating these posts about companies taking years to realize that, for example,the country Serbia and Montenegro no longer exists, I thought it was perhaps best that I checked my online shop to be sure that there were no surprises there.

What did I find? Yep, Serbia & Montenegro, nestling in the countries list.

I hasten to add that this list is built in to the e-commerce software and can't be changed by the user, and the developers have since apologised and promised to correct it. But this does show how hard it can be to keep up with all real world changes in all parts of a company.