A fringe benefit of my job is getting to party hard sometimes with my clients after a deadline passes. Tonight was one of those nights.
At one point we were talking about how our trade provides opportunities for amusement but it's the sort of amusement that you can't really appreciate without knowledge of shit no one gives a fuck about.
So I thought it would be a good idea to talk about how the tax preparation program that one of my clients (who was present for this debauchery) uses, specifically how it treats foreign countries. Instead of letting you type the name of them in on a form, it makes you select them from a drop-down list. Confining the names of countries to a drop-down list means many countries' formal names are almost always abbreviated. If these abbreviations present ambiguity, an explanatory parenthetical follows them. (e.g. "Korea (North)") Did I mention I've gone through the entirety of this drop-down list? I'm sure this shocks no one.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
I wrote "Swiss Confederation" on a Form 8621 this morning because this program doesn't support it and I had to manually prepare one. Specificity in protest.

Now what I wanted to talk about is how this program predates Yemeni reunification because it still has an explanatory parenthetical for Yemen in its drop-down list despite the fact that there is only one Yemen now, and more importantly than that,
it doesn't even have the right explanatory parenthetical, it has the one for the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen.

Of course I needed to introduce all this information because no one but me is so depraved that they would go through the country drop-down list in this tax program.
Did I select an example that pretty much any ignorant American't would know? (The Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea.)
N O P E. I picked the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

"As an example, for the two Congos it has the capital of each country in this explanatory parenthetical," I told them, but before I could continue on to the exciting frontiers of Yemeni reunification, someone at the table said something like, "That's silly, do you even know the capitals of the two Congos?" and without missing a beat I said Kinshasa and Brazzaville with a tone that indicated I couldn't believe the person didn't know this.