Cracks

The easy, snarky post would be "it's the current year and there are still systems out there that can't handle non-ASCII characters", on Twitter. Snark is boring! Pretending to be offended is sad!

Years ago, there was a blog (whose name I forgot) that documented cracks in the system like this; tiny reminders that systems that we take for granted, that we have little cause to give thought to, are oft computer systems written by humans, and humans make mistakes. I enjoy these reminders.

Conjecture: the text was originally written in some older version of Microsoft Word. Word converted the apostrophe in haven't to a "smart" quote, and that got pasted into a system that didn't understand it. Still, the system worked, I got a receipt, KFC didn't buckle under the weight of a thousand UnicodeDecodeErrors, and the world kept turning. :)