The GPS adventures of a distracted developer

My name is Jeffrey Duncan, and at the pestering of Smarty’s editor, I’m writing a blog about the many adventures I’ve had in life and how address data has played a big part in them. 

I met my wife about eight years ago on a dating website. At the time, I lived in Provo, Utah, while she lived in Palmwoods, Australia, on the east coast of Queensland.

On this dating app, I entered the area where I was interested in finding someone, about a 25-mile radius of Provo, Utah. I had no intention of leaving the valley, definitely not the state, and certainly not the country. 

On the other hand, this young lady (whom I later married) listed that she was open to meeting anyone in the whole world. Because this janky website I was using didn’t follow normal protocol, it matched the two of us together. 

In my mind, it never should’ve matched us together since the constraints that I had placed wouldn’t permit me to meet anyone outside of my normal commuting distance, let alone the country. 

Love spoke louder than distance, and I'm glad that I got to marry her.

That was one of my first address-related adventures. She has six children, and I have five. So, together, we have 11 (9 boys and 2 girls), for a grand total of a team of 13. 

That has been a lot of fun, and a lot of the things that our kids want to do are the things that I like to do as well, like hiking and rappelling, going to the lake, cliff jumping, building water slides out of monolithic tarps, building snow forts, and even building tree houses. 

In fact, building is a huge part of my life. I am a furniture maker by trade. I build furniture and cabinets, and this is what got me into selling woodworking tools at a local shop. Eventually, I moved into online sales. I discovered the joys of selling tools online, first on eBay, then on Amazon, and then in a dedicated web store. 

Throughout that process, I was always very focused on taking care of the customer. My experience taught me that part of caring for the customer meant finding out what the customer truly needs, not just what they're telling me. 

For example, when sending out a lot of shipments, occasionally, the wrong item goes out. Builders often order tools just in time (rather than weeks in advance). That means that they’re ready to go to work as soon as the item arrives.  

If we sent the wrong item, the customary thing would be to have them ship it back and then we send the correct item, minimizing the need to trust our customer to actually return the item and potentially eat the cost ourselves if they failed to do so. 

However, in one particular case, the builder had already waited for the item to arrive, and we sent him the wrong thing. The thought of now having to return it and wait for another shipment made this customer want to take their business elsewhere. 

Instead, I decided to trust the customer to follow through on returning it at the risk of eating the cost if the other part was never mailed back to us. I immediately shipped out a replacement item overnight so that they wouldn't be delayed because of our mistake.  

The customer felt very taken care of because we knew what they needed, not just what they said they needed. Because they were taken care of, they brought back repeat business to the company and word-of-mouth referrals to their friends and family members. 

Smarty

Here at Smarty, I started in a similar role as the customer support rep. 

I helped Smarty grow that department, and now, Smarty is very well known for taking care of its customers. As of the date of this blog, Smarty has 6 customer support representatives who are always ready to take a phone call. 

Any phone call that they can't answer right away can be escalated to any of the engineers and even the senior engineers here at Smarty. Customer support reps and engineers sit close to each other. A customer-centric company, Smarty focuses on finding the problems customers deal with and solving them, even if the customers themselves might not know it’s there. 

When I was the support manager, I kept seeing a repeating problem: maintaining bad address databases and relying on that bad data to make impactful decisions.

Now, I have always liked puzzles, but more specifically, problems and challenges to be solved. Addresses constantly bring that puzzle-solving side out of me. There’s no shortage of challenges surrounding trying to match an input address to an authoritative database perfectly. You’d be surprised at the number of nuances.

Even with my now 14-year background in address matching, I still often find that I forget to use my address validation service before I put something into a mapping service, and I have been led astray.

I remember one time that I went to pick up my 14-year-old son from his friend’s house, and he gave me the address. I put it into the map and didn't think about it. I just started driving. 

I arrived at the “address,” and the house didn't exist.

I remember calling him and saying, "Hey, son. What's that address again?"

He told me the same thing. 

And I told him, "No, that doesn't exist."

He double-checked with his friend, then stated, "Oh, yeah, I flip-flopped the north and south. Whoops, here it is."

So I was in the wrong grid of the city. 

As it turns out, young teenagers don't necessarily know their home address. They may know how to get there but don't know the address. And that's okay. Mapping services like Google Maps, MapQuest, etc. are experts at showing where an address would be. 

Where they lack is where Smarty excels: knowing if an address is valid.

Smarty is an expert at letting you know if that address is real. Just because it looks like an address, doesn’t mean it’s a real, deliverable place.

Eventually, I was able to find my way to the right spot to pick up my son, but I didn’t learn my lesson just yet. 

When will I learn?

“Man, I should have validated that address first” could be another great title for this blog. 

Here’s why.

Picture this: It's 8:45 AM, and depending on whether or not the traffic gods are smiling upon me, I'm potentially already running late for an important client meeting. Let’s be real; they never smile down on me. 

I hastily copy-paste the address from their email into my mapping app. 

"123 Main Street," it says confidently, dropping a pin in what appears to be the right neighborhood. 

Perfect! 

I jump into my car and follow the soothing voice of my GPS.

Twenty minutes later…

I'm staring at an empty lot between 121 and 125 Main Street. Why? I navigated there. What gives?!

It turns out that 123 Main Street doesn't actually exist – something an address validation service would have told me immediately. 

If we’re looking on the bright side of things, at least I got a scenic tour of the wrong side of town!

The major downside? I just wasted time and gas, and I might be in hot water with my client.

Even though I moved from the support team to Technical Product Manager, even as an address validation expert (yes, that's a real job), I've still had my fair share of these "adventures." 

Let me share 3 more times when I, despite knowing better, skipped address validation and let my mapping app lead me on an unexpected journey.

1. The case of the phantom office

I once needed to visit a new tech startup. Their address? "555 Innovation Way." My digital map showed it as clear as day. What it didn't tell me was that the building was still under construction, and the company was actually operating from a temporary location across town. 

An address validation check would have flagged this as an invalid delivery point.

2. The great street suffix saga

"Is it knoll, ridge, or glen?" I muttered, staring at my phone. The client had written "St," but my mapping app not-so-helpfully autocorrected to the wrong option. One hour and three similarly named streets later, I finally made it to where I was supposed to be. 

You see, in Irvine, CA there’s:

1 Rocky Ridge

1 Rocky Knoll

1 Rocky Glen

All are valid street types. 

If you just look for 1 Rocky Irvine CA, who knows what option your mapping system will choose. I guess if you’re up for an adventure, plug it in and run with it?

Address validation would have standardized the suffix and immediately pointed me to the correct one.

3. The tale of two cities

This one's my favorite. I needed to visit "742 Evergreen Terrace" (yes, just like the Simpsons). My mapping app found it instantly - in the wrong city. Turns out there were two identically named streets in neighboring cities. 

Address validation would have caught this duplicate and prompted me to confirm the correct location.

Why does this matter? 

Because while mapping services are fantastic at getting you somewhere, address validation ensures you're going to the right somewhere. It's the difference between "This looks like it could be the place" and "This is definitely the place."

Think of it this way: Mapping apps are like your optimistic friend who's confident they know where they're going. 

Address validation is like your detail-oriented friend who double-checks the invitation, confirms the venue, and makes sure you're heading to the right wedding (and not just someone else's party at a similarly named venue that also chose pink and peach for their wedding colors).

This is important because if I, an experienced address expert, can still forget to validate an address, I can only imagine and anticipate that Smarty’s customers will, too, but that they will be doing it with a much larger scale of addresses to carry out much more complex tasks than picking up a kid from a friend’s house or navigating to a client for a one-off meeting.

I learned the hard way, but I’m hoping that you, our readers, won’t have to. 

Learn from my mistakes. 

The next time you're about to skip address validation...

Remember my adventures and take that extra step. Your future self, standing in front of the right building, making an accurate property catastrophe risk model, or delivering packages on time to the right place, will thank you. 

Your grand-scheme projects should rely on best-in-class precision and accuracy.

And, even if you only need to do that for a once-in-a-while moment for your personal use, Smarty has your back there, too. We offer a free tool for you to test your addresses whenever you need to because we know that everybody needs validation (in more ways than one 😉). Seriously. It’s free. We won’t even ask you for your name. 

Check it out!