Reply to post: You think that's bad...

Not a death spiral, I'm trapped in a closed loop of customer experience

Updraft102

You think that's bad...

...try dealing with this when you live in a place that does not have mail delivery. I live in a place in the US like that, where the entire zip code (a fairly typical densely developed residential area with the usual niceties like paved roads, low crime, and no problems with T. rex's or land sharks or other dangerous wildlife) is not served by the US Postal Service, if service means delivering to your residence. We all have to go to the "Post Office" (which itself is run by the highest bidder, on private property, not by the Postal Service) to get our mail, and the street address cannot be used in lieu of the PO Box number on any mail sent to anyone in this zip code. Any mail sent to the street address gets returned to sender immediately, so the intended recipient never knows that the mail he was waiting for was within feet of his PO Box for a short bit of time, before being sent possibly across the country or globe, back to its sender.

It's not possible to set up a forwarding address from the physical address to the mailing address, as the US Postal Service won't accept the physical address in the "from" field, since it's not in the database of deliverable addresses. They also sell this database to other shippers and online merchants, so sometimes I am left arguing with an e-tailer about whether I actually know the address at which I live. I've had a number of orders automatically cancelled because I put in the "wrong" address (which also happened to be the correct one). I love being told to put in another address, as if my residence has a whole bunch of them from which I can choose.

When you add in that much of the US population apparently took the "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night" thing seriously, so they do not believe that there are sizable chunks of the US that the postal service simply refuses to deliver to, for no other reason than it can, that makes it even more fun. Some places refuse to accept a PO Box as the mailing address, even if it is the only mailing address that exists. Many online stores don't tell you whether the shipping method will be USPS or another shipper prior to actually shipping the item, so I don't know which address to give them, if they will even accept the PO Box one. Sometimes they refuse the PO Box and then send it US Mail anyway, which means I never receive the item. I've tried using conditional branching in the "notes to shipper" section, and it is universally ignored.

The US Government's Internal Revenue Service required "at least three of" the typical things one time to prove my address, and I was not about to send a forged document to the US government. There can never be a utility bill with my street address as the mailing address, at least not that I could ever get my hands upon. I could change the address to my physical address, but the bill would never get to me. The service address shown on the bill woulds be my actual physical address, but I asked, and it was not good enough for the IRS. It had to be the mailing address.

The woman on the IRS hotline became irate at my claims of not being able to receive mail sent to my physical address and snarked that I must not be living in the US, then (which I am reasonably sure I am). It's the IRS; I can't exactly take my business elsewhere.

Unlike Mr. Dabbs issue, this one doesn't get resolved once you get over the hump and actually get established. It's an ongoing thing for every person who lives in an area the US Postal Service decides to ignore. Where I live is a lovely place otherwise, but this one thing (which I was not even aware of when I signed on the dotted line to buy my house here) is a real aggravation.

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