Tongiht I didn’t have to deal with webstandards or the like, but with something completely different that was related to webstandards in its own way, though. I had to deal with German standards for business letters. Yes, you read right: In Germany we tend to standardize everything – even business letters…
Everything started out by … well I don’t now where it acutally started. However, the company I work for got a letter from our fiscal authorities stating that everything should be optimized around the authority, especially expenses of the state should be optimized, that is to say minimized as much as possible. To reach that goal, the letter further said, from now on two fiscal offices should be pooled at a central point to a new bigger better ultra-empowered fiscal office with much better customer service (they really called it customer service). And then it came: Well, you got a new tax number. That was in the fine print, by the way. Okay, so we got a new tax number. No problem. The only problem was: In Germany you are required by law to put your tax number on your invoices. And that was the problem I faced. I wanted to alter our invoice template for OpenOffice, which my company deployed throughout the whole office. And then I thought: You could also insert folding marks. Right then. After googling for some hints on the topic I found what I wanted: A perfect description of how to insert folding marks into your letters with OpenOffice. But wait… It was part of a whole bunch of text talking about German standards for business letters. “DIN-some-random-numbers-here” clearly stated how a standard German business letter should look like. They even left you with a choice between a short and a long letter, although both versions differed only on one admeasurement. Everything was regulated by a “DIN-some-other-randome-number-here” and “DIN-there-are-still-numbers-left” and there were still enough “DIN”‘s left to to deal with special cases. Looking through the text in a rush I noted: My God, we’re not in conformance with these standards. And as we already adopted webstandards as a very good thing I had another thought: There has to be a deeper sense in business letter standards, too! And so I found myself in the middle of the important and very fulfilling task of altering all of our 20 letter templates to fit German business letter standards…
If you’re interested: As of this writing I’m still on it.
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