Worst Use of QR Code Ever

Tarek Amr
1 min readOct 15, 2014

The Egyptian National Company for Roads doesn’t get it

This is a ticket issued by the Egyptian National Company for Roads to a truck passing in Cairo-Alexandria road. And the ticket has a QR Code on it, cool, isn't it?

If your IQ is above 80, you may skip the next paragraph!

As you know, computers give us that ability to highlight some text, copy and paste it somewhere else. However, papers do not provide such functionality, yet. Thus, for example, when someone wants to put the URL of his or her website on a paper, so people can access it on their phones, he may just put the URL as it is, but people will end up typing it on their phones, which is prone to spelling mistakes, or he can simply embed it into a QR Code for them to simply scan it via their phones.

So, in brief:

QR Codes are meant to encode data that is pain in the arse to be copied or typed in offline situations.

Now, let’s scan the QR Code on the ticket!

Well, it just says, “National Company for Roads”! Nothing more, nothing less.

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Tarek Amr
Tarek Amr

Written by Tarek Amr

I write about what machines can learn from data, what humans can learn from machines, and what businesses can learn from all three.

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