Earlier in the week a user in our home town had a very interesting problem. She was trying to take an order for delivery to another city about 40 minutes away.
The name of that city (or so we thought!) was St. Catherines. She knew that searching for "St." was trouble so she just searched for "Catherines".
Nothing turned up! This was perplexing because she knew the city existed - it's a pretty good size and she had visited there just a few months ago.
When this happens it almost certainly means that the name was entered incorrectly, so she checked it and was sure she had it right ("Catherines") but it just didn't work.
That's when she called for help. In a case like this the best approach is to assume that there is a spelling mistake - even if you are sure that you have the name right. What you need to do is enter only the first few letters of one of the words in the name.
So in this case we entered "Cather". Still no luck!
We then entered "Cath", and sure enough the city we were looking for turned up. The problems was that the proper spelling for the town is "Catharines" with two A's. Even though we had both been through this city and seen the name hundreds of times we never noticed the somewhat unique spelling.
If you ever find yourself in this situation you should assume that you may have the spelling wrong, and use only a small part of the name to do the search.
Have a great weekend!
