Messy German zip codes

How dare we call the German postcode/zipcode system messed up?

But they have a system of five digit zip codes just like the U.S.!
In a country as small as Germany, isn't a 5 digit zip code enough to give every pothole its very own unique code?

Let's re-phrase it and illustrate it.

Shortly after we said goodbye to everybody stateside, a friend tried to  send a letter via USPS Global Express.

He called, exasperated and said Your address does not exist!

What?

That's what they said at the Post Office. Your town is not in their computer.

He told us that the USPS computer had the entry 12345 ATown, where we were in 12345 ToyTown.

And that is where the problem lies. Once outside the big cities, the Germans have carefully lumped bunches of small towns under the same zip code.

The Germans obviously don't have a caveat with the data when a foreign country asks. The problem is that all these little towns have tons of duplicate street names. Each has its German equivalent of Main Street, giving ten or more possible addresses for 1, Main Street, Zip Without Town Name.

But the computer is never wrong.

These days, the darn machines are never wrong, so the USPS folks could not do the correct Zip+Town printed label needed for Global Express because they cannot edit the Zip+Town popping up on the screen.

But wait. While they could not change the 12345 ATown, the street part of the address is not controlled by the computer, you can put anything you want there.

Even a "happy new year, postmaster", if you wanted to.

So, we told the friend to add the name ToyTown to the street part and let the human at our end figure things out.

Which worked.

That was several years ago, over a decade after the Germans switched from a 4 digit to a 5 digit system.

Kind of reassuring in this oh so controlled and efficient world, in'it?

As to the rest of the system, we are getting to know more neighbors because we give them the mail that lands in our letter box whenever the merrily privatized postal service sends out a new guy with a GPS and box of envelopes.

Anybody up for some database schema normalization?