A single apostrophe in a store address grounded 38 lorries at a supermarket supplier

A logistics firm sends EDIFACT despatch advice messages to a supermarket chain for every lorry it loads, and the chain refuses deliveries that arrive without one. One Friday in October, every message was rejected and 38 lorries arrived unannounced, forcing staff to book each one in by hand while drivers waited. The cause was an apostrophe in the new store's address, St John's Retail Park, which EDIFACT treats as a segment terminator because the generator never escaped special characters. The chain's syntax report rejected the whole batch, since all of the day's messages were combined into one interchange. The firm's system archived the returned reports unread, having never seen anything but acceptance in four years. The fix involved escaping values, parsing every returned report with alerts for failures, and sending each despatch advice in its own interchange.