Databases.

Dumbasses.

There are aspects of my life that are in probably hundreds of different databases.   There is no way for me to know which databases I’m in and there is no way to correct errors when they’re discovered.

I live a in small town. Over the past six months or so, fewer and fewer companies will ship anything to me (including Amazon.com).

Why?

Because my street address is not in the United States Postal Service (USPS) database.

For some unknown reason, in many small mountain towns,  the post office won’t deliver mail to our street addresses.  They force everyone use a PO Box at the post office.  (At first I thought it had to do with our harsh winters, but I noticed that people who lived outside of town get their mail delivered to their roadside mailboxes.) So according the USPS, my PO Box is correct and my street address is invalid.

The shipping companies like UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. are just the opposite.  They won’t deliver to a PO Box, but will deliver to the street address.

But some idiots at UPS and Amazon decided to use the USPS database to verify shipping addresses.   Way to go!  You’ve just knocked a whole town off the map.  In the idiots’ small-minded world, everybody lives in the ‘burbs and everybody has a mailman and the lawns are mowed.

Why isn’t there an override button?  Why can’t I go to the UPS website and create an address record that is correct?  It’s like I can’t be trusted to know my own address.

No.  The orders from just about anywhere on-line just get kicked backed in my face.

I’ve tried to contact UPS, but I don’t expect the effort to go far.  The response so far is “I’m sorry your address isn’t in the database.”  My reply was that an apology doesn’t fix the problem and to escalate this to someone who can fix it.

I guess the only alternative is to have the order shipped to a friend, an hour away in the city.