Well, I may have been a little confused about the house numbering, but putting the house number before the flat number is still illogical!
I didn't know Americans called it the "standard" system. I've always known it as "imperial". I suspect that Americans don't like the thought of being part of the British Empire (strange!) and have renamed it rather than go to the bother of changing to metric...
In Britain, by the way, there are many strange ways of numbering houses. The standard is the 1,3,5... and 2,4,6... one, but you can never be sure. For example, I live in an area in London where the streets form a grid system, almost like an American city. However, rather than have *street* names, we have *square* names. That means that all the houses on one *grid* are thought of as belonging to the same square. That means that the houses on the other side of the street are officially on a different square, because they back onto the next grid along. See? I recently had to direct a very puzzled Australian couple who obviously thought I was mad when I tried to explain why they were walking along Leinster Square when the sign on the other side of the road said Prince's Square. They evidently thought I was making it all up.
