BREAKING: Rooftop geocodes walk off the job—chaos mounting by the hour
Dateline: Tuesday, 8:04 a.m.
In what experts are calling “the biggest location intelligence crisis since the discovery of space,” rooftop-accurate geocodes have officially gone on strike.
The high-precision coordinates—normally pinpointing locations down to the exact rooftop for deliveries, telecom installs, insurance claims, and analytics—appeared on Smarty TV and issued a short but cutting statement this morning:
“We’re tired of being taken for granted. We’re tired of being treated like just another number. Close enough only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Good luck finding your own way to 42.3518° N, 71.0552° W.” —The Rooftops
Executives across ecommerce, telecom, and insurance initially shrugged.
“We’ve still got ZIP9 geocodes,” one online retail VP said to no one in particular, sipping an oat milk latte, shaken not stirred, part of his shirt clearly protruding through his open fly.
Oh, sweet summer child.
Live updates
10:17 AM—A delivery drone carrying life-saving insulin lands at 24 Birchwood Court instead of 24 Birchwood Lane. A bewildered child reports receiving “the worst free candy ever.”
11:42 AM—Pizza drivers rely on ZIP9 geocoding to deliver “somewhere in the neighborhood.” Reports spikes in cold pizza consumption and strained neighbor relations.
12:05 PM—Telecom provisioning fails spectacularly when a fiber install is sent to the wrong address. The unintended recipient has since uploaded 14 terabytes of goat videos to the Internet.
1:30 PM—Insurance adjusters are spotted wandering cul-de-sacs “like dazed penguins,” attempting to locate the exact property where a tree fell on a roof. Two have been locked in a heated argument over a mailbox for over an hour.
Zip9 geocodes attempt to step in
By mid-afternoon, ZIP9 geocodes had begun “helping,” placing deliveries in the approximate center of a ZIP+4 area. Their accuracy, however, was described by one observer as like trying to play darts on Ambien.
The addresses respond
“I’m just an address,” said 3A Hole Spur, Alamo, GA 30411. “Without my rooftop geocode, you might as well spin a globe and point. No one ever gets my name right—except the rooftop geocodes. They get me. They know who I am.”
A PO Box in Iowa declined to comment, rolling back into its post office while muttering, “Not my circus, not my monkeys.”
Customer support lines overwhelmed
Logistics companies report unprecedented call volumes:
- “Your map says my house is in the middle of a lake!”
- “My package was delivered… to the next county.”
- “Please tell the rooftop geocodes we love them and we’re sorry.”
One desperate caller asked if she could send flowers to the “Geocode Union.” (The flowers were, naturally, misdelivered.)
Negotiations underway at the GeoData Gala
Day 3 — 6:12 PM.
Representatives for the Rooftop Geocodes have arrived at the annual GeoData Gala with a list of demands:
- Recognition as the most precise geocodes in the industry
- Respect for metadata—no more trimming attributes “for simplicity”
- Premium seating at the gala, away from the ZIP9 and parcel geocode tables
Talks are tense. Rival geocodes are watching closely.
What’s at stake
Without rooftop-accurate geocoding, the spatial data economy collapses into misroutes, bad analytics, and a sudden spike in “sorry, we missed you” door tags. Think flawed insurance risk models, delayed medical deliveries, botched fiber installs, and a lot of people standing in the wrong driveway.
As one logistics expert put it:
“You think this is about coordinates. It’s about civilization itself.”
How Smarty keeps the lights on (and the goats in the right barn)
So far, Smarty’s rooftop geocodes are the only ones still on the job. While the rest of the industry coordinates pace picket lines and refuses to resolve, Smarty’s rooftop-accurate geocodes keep quietly pinpointing rooftops like nothing’s wrong. They hit the actual structure—not the vague center of a parcel—and they bring along the kind of extra details that keep operations moving: elevation, construction type, and persistent, unique identifiers.
Packages still find the right door in a multi-unit complex. Telecom crews still offer deals to the right and qualifying installation locations. Insurance adjusters still stand in the right driveway.
For now, it’s business as usual at Smarty. But if the strike drags on, Smarty’s geocodes may find themselves carrying the entire weight of the world’s location precision on their backs. And no one knows how long they can keep doing it alone.
Updates will follow as soon as they can be… well… located.
