Since leaving Catalyst to follow my interests there seem to be a neverending number of organisations e-mailing to my old e-mail address, which I have to go through to update to a new e-mail address. This evening it was Air New Zealand's turn.

Going through their update form, I noticed a few other little details were wrong, and they had a couple of my pet hates down pat:

• My surname was spelled 'Mcmillan' rather than 'McMillan'
• My city was down as 'Wellington' rather than 'Porirua'

For no particularly good reason that I can see, they don't provide me with the ability to edit my surname. I have to ring some 0800 number, and I was kind of all 0800ed out having had to ring TelstraClear earlier. (To question their sense in wanting to deliver a password for an e-mail account to that same e-mail account... but that's another story...)

I can at least correct the city, though, right?

Well, wrong, actually. It seems I can't. Somewhere they have a list of the cities in New Zealand, and Porirua is not one of them. My goal, I have therefore decided, is to see if I can't get Air New Zealand to add Porirua to their (undeniably stupid) list of cities, by the time Porirua's next (43rd) birthday rolls around on October 2nd.

To that order, I visited their feedback system which they outsource to some "On Demand CRM Software As A Service Provider". After overcoming my general feeling of ickiness at being the "C" in "CRM", I fired this missive across the bows:

I wonder if the Porirua City Council is a customer of Air New Zealand?

Your website would have me believe that there is no such city as 'Porirua' in New 
Zealand, although it has been a city since October 2nd, 1965.
 
According to the Porirua City Council website, you can discover that it:
 
 "is nestled in a stunning harbour setting just 20 minutes north of
  New Zealand
 
 "Extending from Kenepuru Drive in the south to Pukerua Bay in the
  north, from Titahi Bay on the coast to Judgeford in the east,
  Porirua is a young city with a reputation for energy, creativity
  and talent.
 
 "Porirua City's diverse population of 50,300 people (June 2003
  estimate) boasts the fourth highest average household income
  in New Zealand.

Wow!  Fourth highest average household income?  Wouldn't want their airpoints 
letters getting lost in the mail, would you?

Regards,
Andrew McMillan.

The reference number for my question is '080919-000150' which suggests I'm the 150th bit of feedback so far today, which probably isn't bad for a site that supposedly does over NZD$1 billion per annum. Surely if the site is that important they can have a better set of mailing data than that, though.

I wonder whether that site enforcing that my city is 'Wellington' is a side-effect of the NZ Post address validation rules. I'm sure that's what Air New Zealand will get back to me and say it is, regardless of whether it is or not.

The letter I got from TelstraClear which prompted my earlier 0800 excesses also managed to get 'Porirua' as my city. They managed to have the old postcode though, so no discounting for them, I guess - they should be using someone like PureData to fix their postcodes up!

A much higher quality address database is the one for the Electoral Roll. It's very important to them that all of the addresses in their database transit through NZ Post as slickly as possible. When I go to the Electoral Enrolment Centre website to check my enrolment details I can happily enter 'Porirua' as a city, and they have no trouble recognizing where I live, on that basis.

Looking at the electorate is kind of curious, though. The electorate of "Mana" appears to align quite closely to the boundaries of the city of Porirua, but it's called "Mana". Is there an aversion to the name "Porirua" that encourages people to think up new names for this beautiful coastal city?

So with that, I hereby declare the campaign to call Porirua "Porirua" open.

If you live in Porirua, and feel like helping out, find out some interesting facts about Porirua and visit the system to leave them with a lighthearted post encouraging them to add this city into their database.

If you don't yet live in Porirua then you probably need to look here :-)