I cannot remember past moves being this challenging. But this time our move has been really complex when it comes to the address. Now, sure, we tried to maintain addresses in two states for a few months which was our own fault, but even now, getting everything untangled has been challenging and it feels like technology has worked against us. Warning: this is a cautionary tale, but also a rant.
Google - there's disagreement amongst the various Google properties (most notably Google Maps vs Waze) about what our address actually is - whether there's an "N" (north) on the street name or not. This extends to the real estate sites as well. I find myself being inconsistent when giving our address, but the mail still gets here.
Amazon - your address will exist in multiple places in their database and updating in one place won't update it in others. We had a large Subscribe & Save order take a tour of the country, and someone sent someone a gift off Rachel's wish list, only to have it returned after delivery was refused at our old address. We still don't know who tried to send Rachel a gift.
UPS - the only reason we even knew about the attempted gift to Rachel was that it took UPS nearly two weeks to stop sending us updates for packages to our old address, even though we had updated our address. Yes, we got emails for all the deliveries the new owners of our house got.
USPS - same deal - we got package tracking notifications for purchases by the new owners for over a week after changing the address.
Plus, we had a number of people change their records to our new address in California and continue to mail us, including local politicians wanting us to vote in Washington state and realtors wanting to help us sell our Washington home. This isn't forwarded mail, this is mail printed with our new address. The real kicker is the one from Washington State Department of Social Services.
But speaking of forwarded mail, we did receive ballots for the mid-July whatever from the King County Elections office (seriously - you get like 14-16 ballots a year in Washington state - there's "voice of the people" and then there's "shouldn't the representatives handle some of this stuff?").
AT&T - I've never seen this company as disjointed and disorganized as my current dealings with them. They cover our wireless phones and internet, but they're so siloed it actually works against them to all share the same name. They really need to get their act together or stop trying to pretend they're all one company. So much trouble trying to get all the billing set up and going to the same place. Every time I call them, I end up being told that whoever I'm talking to can't help me because they can't access whatever area of the business I'm trying to deal with and having to transfer me.
Comcast - until we moved, this was the best experience I'd ever had with the company. We only had internet through them, but every step along the way - signing up, installation, extra installation after determining the old line had been destroyed by me with a shovel, customer service, pricing, speed and the complete lack of outages made my experience with Comcast great. Until I was ready to end service because we were moving. In the end, I probably had nine interactions (phone, chat, Twitter) and had to request cancelation three times because each previous request never got recorded anywhere in their system. During that time, I got emails confirming the services the new owner had requested and continued billing, an absolute mess.
Washington State DOL (aka DMV) - they have a way to indicate that a vehicle has been moved out of state, but not a person. No way to truly cancel services or indicate that that you won't need to renew stuff in future years, which means they'll waste money trying to get us to pay for renewals we don't need.
Of course, then there's all the flyers we get down here from realtors who want to help us sell this house. We just bought it! That's just lazy marketing or inefficient selection criteria when determining who to distribute the flyers to. Especially from the realtor who just sold this house to us.
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