Adventures in Data Processing

Finally, a talk with the DP house’s senior programmer revealed the problem. An error in one of the DP house’s internal programs was causing data in delimited files to slide into empty data fields. So if an address field was empty, the city name would slide into it, and then the state would slide left into the city, and so on. If the file had been mailed, response would have been 10 percent to 15 percent less, with no one the wiser.