So my phone finally showed up, and I’ve spent the better part of the afternoon on the phone with Experian and other folks, trying to finally resolve my paypal issue. After a couple of hours, it is clear what the problem is.
I live in a town of 300 people that for reasons that I can not explain does not have mail delivery. Instead, we have a local post office. Thus, I have not only a residential address, but a post office box. Every day, after ten am, we trudge up the hill to the post office to get our mail and any packages.
The problem, however, is that Experian, paypal, and many other folks want a physical address, but they, for reasons I do not understand, only have my post office box. On my credit report, it has my type of residence as a post office box. I have no idea why that is the case, because I always include my physical address on everything. Now I get to spend the next two hours explaining this to multiple different people.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’ve had PO box addresses for about ten years now, and I am astounded at how confused businesses are by this. Don’t these corporate fatcats know we grow good people in our small towns?
trollhattan
So, yew are one of the Heartland Amurkans(tm) I keep hearing about in Republican speachifying. Good luck convincing these entities you actually exist. (You might try telling them you can’t put a house number on a shopping cart, just to hear their reaction.)
Sentient Puddle
Well, you’re not the only West Virginian living the joys of small towns:
The Grand Panjandrum
I’m feeling you bro. We are seriously thinking of buying a home in a town where high speed internet means 7Mbps.
Alice Blue
Seeing as how I live in Gay, Georgia, it’s mind boggling to think how many codes of conduct I’ve violated. On the plus side, we have a post office and mail delivery!
cleek
it’s because someone in the chain has used software (and data from the USPS) that knows that your address really is a PO box.
i know because i’ve been writing this kind of software for the last 6 months.
freelancer
Utoh, McNaughton’s back again check it top
Wreck it – let’s begin.
The emopants freaking out about Obama stepping on the Constitution is James Fucking Madison.
Culture of Truth
On my credit report, it has my type of residence as a post office box. I have no idea why that is the case
Because the people who make those reports are idiots who never pay a price for being wrong most of the time.
Culture of Truth
On my credit report, it has my type of residence as a post office box. I have no idea why that is the case
Because the people who make those reports are idiots who never pay a price for being wrong most of the time.
cleek
it’s because someone in the chain has software (and data from the USPS) that knows your postal address really is a PO box, and they have no way to correct that information.
i know because i’ve been writing this kind of software for the last 6 months.
Crashman
Wooho! Free market at work! Keep the government out of our mail!
Persia
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Me three (or more at this point). Even more fun was when Enhanced 911 came around and all the street addresses changed.
cleek
sorry for the duplicate. obviously, the white warrior is about to die…
MBL
Getting a virus warning from the front page.
arguingwithsignposts
I lived for quite a long time in a small town where there was no residential route delivery. Loved it. Also, granduncle was a postmaster at a p.o. with fewer than 300 boxes a long time ago.
mnpundit
Don’t live in a small town eh? I lived in a town of 400,000 and I was looking to move up.
J
@Sentient Puddle:
You beat me to the Fort Gay story.
Hardhead
Hi John,
The universe is in perfect balance. I want to thank you for providing the offset to my experience of buying a 2011 Toyota Sienna in under 3 hours for $150 less per month than the comparable Honda Odyssey.
With a credit score over 700 despite a short sale on my home in Florida two years ago.
I don’t have any rational explanation for either of our experiences, but I appreciate your pain on my behalf.
One thing is clear though, these guys are fully qualified to handle other people’s money and credit because the results have been so great, and innovative, and rewarding for them.
jeffreyw
I live on a rural mail route, my address for years was PO Box xxxx, Rural Route 4, mytown, IL. Then came 9-11 emergency numbers, and the people running the thing just had to have a street address. The post office complied, and issued an address to all us country folks. So I’m all of a sudden my addy is xxxx countryroad, mytown, IL, 0zip0. The bank that held my mortgage went all ape shit, wanting to know why I moved and I needed insurance on my new place, and on my old place and why didn’t I tell them I was moving and and and…
Amanda in the South Bay
Even in the middle of fucking suburbia PO Boxes can be a pain-I got one earlier this year right before I went through a little homeless phase, and have kept it since. I generally like it, but I hate it when certain companies won’t ship to a PO Box-I mean, you can put in on your freaking DL as an address, but you (Im looking at you, Cupertino Kool Aid) wont’ ship a fucking Touch to it?
Anne Laurie
I’m waiting for the glibertarians to show up and explain that, if it weren’t for the nanny state, you & your 299 neighbors could chip in and pay for your own private postal delivery person so you wouldn’t need one of those dubious untrustworthy “post office boxes”…
I’m assuming your town lost its individual-delivery “privileges” due to the privatization of the national post office, which was going to save money by weaning us all off the government tit and “streamline” conversion to full for-profit mail services. Because, of course, all the hours you and your neighbors spend trudging (driving) to the central location are “free”, or at least not monetizable by Fedex or UPS.
Lynnehs
300? That is small! The one I grew up in has about 3,000 people now, although I don’t know how many it used to have back then. The land mass is only 1.2 square miles, though. You could literally walk the entire town.
Just read that article about Microsoft and Xbox not believing that Ft. Gay was a real town! I wonder if they give people in PA any trouble. They’ve got some really weird names there, like Bondage and Intercourse.
foxhunter
@Alice Blue: Oh, wow!
I live in McDonough…spent many days driving around the backroads of Senoia and Gay during my high school days, acting the fool.
PurpleGirl
Somehow they were checking not what you put on an application but what was in a database that they used to check addresses.
Joseph Nobles
Ending Net Neutrality will fix all of this.
sukabi
do yourself a favor and short-circuit your Paypal hellscape with a complaint to your State AG… adding … and write a letter to the editor of the largest newspaper in the state and contact the local news “people helper” to try and get some coverage…
if not you’ll spend the next 2 hours, 2 months and 2 years trying to get them to understand, at which time they will say that the PO Box wasn’t the problem at all, and Paypal will have declared that you’re well past their 180 day rule and they’ve decided that you really didn’t need the money in your account anyway so they’ve closed the account and so sorry, we can’t refund that money to you because we can’t be sure you’re who you say you are.
GeneJockey
I grew up in a town of 500.
We had P.O. boxes, because the law (as I understand it) requires free delivery to rural addresses, and to addresses in towns and cities above a certain size, but not to towns of around that size. We didn’t even HAVE a street address until sometime in the 1970s.
There were some ‘towns’ nearby that were too small to have their own post offices, and they got free delivery.
So, you live in a town that is too small, or too large.
Jim C
@foxhunter:
My mom locked her keys in the car at a truck stop in McDonough once. It took two truckers almost a half hour to get into the Pacer (it was 1978…).
Great times …
PurpleGirl
Should have added that there are numerous commercial databases of addresses that are used to clean up private databases, like the one a charity might create from their donors. (It’s a way to find people who may have moved or typos in the charity’s database.) And your town got input to show the Postal Services’ PO Box numbers and not your physical address.
licensed to kill time
@MBL:
FYWP just ate my comment, then “Database not found”. Something odd is going on, the page is taking forever to load, there is a big white space above the Balloon Juice header, and the sub-header is above the Balloon Juice logo instead of below it.
No virus warning from Avast though. I’m on FF 3.6.8 though I tried loading BJ on Opera as well and it was wonky at first, then loaded reluctantly. Hmm.
LT
Hey, I’m moving out of the country and have two kitties that (ripping guts out) need to go to new homes.
Should I wait for an animal thread for this?
jo6pac
I just went through this Cap 1 business card, just another motherland security thing. The’ve mailed the bill to the po box for 20yrs and all of a sudden the world was crashing down on them.
sukabi
fyi John, your website has started experiencing some formatting issues in the last hour or so… I’m using a Mac with the latest version of Firefox… the page is very slow loading, has a 1 1/4″ of white space at the very top of the page, and your little rotating linked tagline below your Balloon Juice logo has moved above the logo…
also comments are very slow to submit…
Jim C
I grew up in a small IL town back in that time – less than 1000. We had the post office, but no home delivery. (We did have street addresses before that, though.)
So I get what you’re talking about completely JC.
foxhunter
@Jim C: Heh. There WAS only one truck stop in McDonough over the years. Sadly, the Lot Lizards lost a spot to ply their trade when said truck stop closed about 6 years ago. Place still stands, but no longer serving fuel or three day old hotdogs. I remember when it opened…dirt roads all around. Now surrounded by HD and other big box stores.
Those were the days.
LT
@sukabi: I’m getting roughly the same thing on Safari. Ages for a page to load, and maybe 2 inches of white space on top.
foxhunter
Oh, and FYWP also, too.
khead
Dad still has a hard-wired rotary phone on the kitchen wall.
I think the mail comes to the house though.
MattR
@licensed to kill time: My antivirus is complaining about ie6sux.js
And is it just me, or are there a ton of Georgians on this blog? Unfortunately, when I hear the town McDonough, GA I have flashbacks to a hellacious week of work spent there about 7 years ago. No issues with the town or people. Just ended up working way too many hours because a storm in the northeast kept my relief from arriving. I would imagine McDonough is much more developed now, since it looked like they were doing a bunch of work in the area when I was there.
Violet
Apparently the Patriot Act requires banks and other financial institutions to have an actual physical address on file. I moved a little bit ago and forwarded all mail to a P.O. Box. When I tried to change my address with the credit card companies online, they wouldn’t let me change the address to a P.O. Box. They said it had to be a physical address. So I didn’t change it.
Eventually they got the forwarding info from the Post Office and changed it themselves. And now when I log into a credit card website, it has my address as a P.O. Box. They haven’t bugged me about an actual physical address.
Stupid.
slag
I can see why this would be a drag, but I’m pretty sure using your PO Box is still better than letting everyone know which meth lab you live in.
MikeJ
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Unless they ship via US mail, they can’t ship to it. FedEx and UPS don’t have access to PO boxes. Unless you’re buying stuff from Eudora Welty. Bitch has no excuse.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@freelancer:
I love how they stick George W Bush next to the liberal bogeymen.
Stillwater
I’m getting a Threat Blocked pop up every time BJ loads.
The file name includes ‘ie6sux.js’. Really slow loads.
Legalize
Yuck. All of that sounds horrible, Cole. Mrs. Legalize’s family lives about 45 minutes away in a fairly sizable college town, and that’s “country” enough for me.
Jim C
@foxhunter:
That they were, though I’m surprised they lasted as long as they did. I figured they would have been swallowed up by the tidal wave of suburban sprawl long ago.
The waitress we had was a true-life representation of Flo from “Alice,” short of saying “Kiss my grits!” that is.
licensed to kill time
Blerg. The site is up, the site is down. Got it on Opera for a minute, thought Yay! and came back to Firefox and now it’s wonky again. {{{sob}}}
MikeJ
@Stillwater: A lot of obfuscation going on in that file, stuff that’s not needed for fixing the formatting for a lame browser. I’m still disassembling it.
I seem to recall bj got hacked once before and had stuff injected into the site’s javascript.
licensed to kill time
Re: weird loading issue:
Every error in Firefox’s error console has jetztvorun.netzl/s2 in it. I have no idea what that means but I have never seen it before.
Omnes Omnibus
@slag: In a town that small, everyone knows which meth lab is his.
Punchy
What? I thawt you tawt at Dub-V and lived in Morgy…..
WereBear
Yep. George W. Bush (in the guise of the Patriot Act) reaches out to ruin your life yet again. Bwahahahaha!
About five years ago we finally got emergency dialing with 911, and previously our street was apparently numbered with the Japanese system; according to the age of the house, not the directional position. So we got a new address.
It was hours on the phone, explaining we hadn’t moved, which made them sooooo suspicious. If I had to do it over again, I’d just say we moved. Down the street. Yup.
elmo
I lived for eight years in a mountain town with no mail delivery. Thing is, it was in California, and it’s nearly impossible to explain to people that yes, there really are tiny little mountain hamlets in California that don’t deliver mail. The whole town is a 2-mile-wide square, housing about 7000 fulltime residents and accommodating 50K on a big ski weekend, surrounded by three million acres of national forest. The closest real shopping was in Carson City, two-and-a-half hours away.
God, I miss that place.
Mumphrey
That struck me as really funny. I guess you know the economy is really bad when people can’t even afford to live in a car or a roomy cardboard box.
licensed to kill time
I disabled javascript and reloaded the page, went very slowly but when it came back it looked normal. However, no buttons on combox! Re-enabled javascript, buttons are back but site again has the white space at top/header & subheader reversed, and still loading like an arthritic gymnast. Gack.
No, I don’t have much patience, why do you ask?
steve
In the Yukon, to get satellite TV you had to give them a residential address that they would understand in southern Canada. So everyone in the remote towns that I was in, made up fake ones (123 Main St) or use planning maps (Lot 21, House 9). It didn’t matter, as any mail sent to me at 123 main St. would be put in my mail box at the P.O. as the Postmistress knew everyone anyway.
TooManyJens
@MattR:
According to John McCain, we are all Georgians.
freelancer
Wow, the main page cannot be accessed at all, nor can the next thread up.
ETA: well now they can, but something is FUCKED UP in Denmark.
Corner Stone
@Jim C: I am so sorry for you that you believed her story for why she spent so much time at various truck stops.
Joseph Nobles
My suggestion, John: grab your video camera tomorrow before you trudge up to get your mail. Start recording at your house with your address in view, narrate your journey to the post office (counting off the addresses and streets), film yourself unlocking your box, and then finish up with a nice howdy-doo to the postmaster who verifies your identity.
Then mail Paypal a DVD of the video along with your complaint to the State AG.
Church Lady
A population of 300 is not a town. Heck, it’s not even a subdivision. You live on a speed bump on the road to Morgantown.
henqiguai
@Anne Laurie (#21):
Sorry, Anne Laurie, but I live in the north central hinterlands of your (current) fair state. And some of us in this semi-rural ‘burg also got no home delivery — as the Post Office explained to me, it’s the (local) Post Master’s option, so the local PM decided, as a cost savings, to not deliver to homes within 1 mile of the post office (but at least our PO Boxes are free).
And how else is a reclusive stranger like me gonna see any of my neighbors ?
Gina
We have a similar thing here, though it’s for our development. There’s a central building with mailboxes, not official PO boxes. No home delivery, so for our address and the computer program gremlins, we just put the street address as line 1, and the box number as line 2.
Extra fun ensues when it’s time to vote, as our post office address is in the next town, while we legally live and pay taxes in the town where we vote. After 9 years, we mostly don’t have a problem with them finding us on the rolls, but I take the little reminder card from the Board of Election with my name and address info just in case.
Crusty Dem
@freelancer:
That’s awesome. If I had the photoshop ability, I would rejigger it so George W Bush (in Madison’s position) was taking a dump on the constitution while Thomas Jefferson and James Madison Eiffel Tower one of Jefferson’s slaves in the background. In the foreground, Woodrow Wilson is pissing on the Liberty Bell (as a small tribute to Glenn Beck).. Far in the background, a 300 foot mecha-Obama (with turban) is stomping on the Capitol building while fellating the Washington Monument.
What? It makes more sense than McNoughton’s painting…
Also, The Aristocrats!
Yukoner
@Amanda in the South Bay:
I’ve had a PO box forever and the only disadvantage is the number of companies in both the US and Canada who will not ship what I’m trying to buy from them to my PO box. It always comes down to their use of courier companies to ship their product. I will patiently explain that courier companies will not deliver to my physical address (and my physical address is actually a legal description that references a mile post on the Alaska Highway that no longer exists). I then ask them to just use the post office as then I will get the parcel. I’ve actually had sales people lecture me on how they won’t use the post office because couriers are superior. My response is always along the lines of, if courier companies are so superior, why won’t they deliver to me when the post office will?
Paris
If you’re walking to pick up your mail every day, you definitely deserve some carbon footprint credit. Getting the mail was my job growing up and I mostly looked forward to it because I had to go right by the pharmacy where the candy was sold.
hamletta
My hometown has never had home delivery. It’s tiny, and all the physical addresses refer to walkways where vehicular traffic is prohibited.
Had to protect the wimmen ‘n’ chirren from the horses.
All the houses face the walkways, too, so it’d be a bear of a postal route for the poor mailperson.
jharp
I had a post office box for years. Really really liked it. No junk mail. And check it whenever you feel like it.
Interesting to me at the time. It was free to have the mail brought to your house. But to go pick it up at the post office was something like $40 bucks a year.
Anyone remember having a milkman?
slippy
It’s no surprise you are having trouble with Paypal. They are, hands-down, the worst customer service I have ever dealt with. They are impossible to get hold of, their website is a shifting morass of unnavigable menus, and they are slower than the Pony Express in getting money from one account to another – ELECTRONICALLY! I am severing all contact with them and vowing never to EVER use them again for anything because they suck THAT BAD.
SiubhanDuinne
@freelancer #7: WTF is that weird perforation all along the treetops?
Stiv Bator
My local Post office solved my problem w/ the PO box/street address problem (mainly online shipping problems).Rural, rent a po box vs home delivery due to theft.
They told me to add my po box # to the end of my zip code.
So amazonApple, etc now has
Stiv Bator
123 n sausage st.
New sticky wicket, wa
98239-2345
2345 is my po box number, so when ever amazon, etc decide to ship via usps w/out my knowledge, the local PO knows to stick it in my box Instead of return to sender.
Skepticat
@LT:
LT, where are you?
I live on a small island with no mail service, so have a P.O. box as a mailing address. It’s become quite an annoyance.
andynotadam
Our little town post office has a policy of not delivering mail to anyone who lives with 500 yards of the PO. I haven’t had the joy of your little nightmare yet, John, but I did have to write a letter to the underwriter of my last mortgage explaining it and as other have said have the joy of trying to out-guess those e-commerce sites that can’t deal with a billing address that is a PO Box and a physical address (I actually have one so the fire department can find me) for UPS and Fed-Ex. I’m currently re-financing and things appear to be going smoothly. Obviously I’m misinformed.
Luthe
I feel your pain. Living in on-campus housing as a grad student leaves me in a similar predicament; I have a physical address for my apartment and a PO Box at the campus center that my mail goes to. It’s been a pain in the ass changing my address on everything, especially when I have to explain that I live in one location but my mail goes elsewhere. ::le sigh::
bago
300 people? That’s almost a floor of building 34 at Microsoft, if you count the contractors.
ET
I live in D.C. and had to patiently say to one person over the phone that yes DC wasn’t a state but they if they put “DC” in the state box it would work.
Bette Noir
Feeling your pain in Bumfuk, PA . . . just spent three months persuading PA DMV that people with PO boxes are people, too. Not only do we have no mail delivery, we don’t have real addresses, either.
Local fire department assigned us a four digit number 100 years ago, UPS assigned us a different one 20 years ago and now I learn that Google Earth has assigned yet another four digit street address for us.
The DMV and voter registration board won’t have anything to do with any of those numbers . . . the local tax board is the only entity willing to give us the benefit of the doubt.
PS Doesn’t Experian’s “hold music” make your teeth hurt?