And by “fun” we mean “that sucks.”

We’re trying to send a set of addresses to our friends who are throwing us a party. As it happens, Apple’s address book has no “arbitrary export” feature, which SUCKS. It’ll do VCards (which are great for moving between address management tools, but lousy for arbitrary data manipulation), but that’s all. However, it does have an address-label printing feature, which OUGHT to be at least good enough to get us past this roadblock (leaving aside the issue of data-lock-in for a minute, anyway).

However, in previewing the labels, we noticed that sometimes it was using the partner/spouse information in the addressee line (as in “Chris B___ and Cathy P____”) and sometimes not (as in “Edgar A____”, with his lovely wife nowhere to be found). Both records had the spouses listed in the “spouse” field. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth resulted before we were able to figure out for the Applecare dude exactly why this was. (We’re pretty sure this isn’t the way information is supposed to flow on those calls.)

As it turns out, when printing labels, the Address Book checks to see if there’s a record for the spouse. Unaccountably, if there is, it decides NOT to append the spouse name to the adressee line. Sure enough, Mrs Edgar has a record of her own, but Cathy does not (sorry, Cathy). The theory held up well; the minute we created a record for Cathy, she disappeared from the addressee line with Chris.

But it gets even suckier: For some reason, Tony’s spouse wasn’t showing up, either, and Emily doesn’t even have a record; she’s listed — with both first and last names — only as his spouse. However, we do know two other people named Emily, but with different last names. This partial match is enough to make Address Book omit her from the addressee line.

The AppleCare response? Don’t use the Spouse field, which means returning to the morass of somehow fitting differently-surnamed couples into a single set of firstname, lastname fields. Uh, no thanks, jackasses.

So: Way to go, Apple! Looks like I’m about to fucking TYPE the addresses into Excel manually. What. The. Fuck?