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historicfirearms
09-15-2015, 05:09 PM
I recently started having address verification problems while ordering stuff online. We have lived in the same house for over 40 years and I have always written my address exactly the same. Last week I tried to order some things for my old Airstream. The company called me on Monday and said they could not verify my address and couldn't print a shipping label. He even said that he put my address in Google and it didn't show up. I got a chuckle and told him to cancel my order. We live in a rural area of Michigan and I've had people tell me that their GPS couldn't find my address before, so I wasn't surprised that Google couldn't find it either. What's odd is that just a few minutes ago I tried to place an order through Home Depot online. That order didn't go through either, said they couldn't confirm my billing address. What gives? Did we fall off the face of the earth? Anybody else ever had this problem?

flyingmonkey35
09-15-2015, 05:21 PM
Ask them how they are determining your address. Then double check with the USPs.

starmac
09-15-2015, 06:03 PM
Ah the computer age. lol If everybody is verifying addresses, then how come I keep getting others mail??

GRUMPA
09-15-2015, 06:19 PM
We live very rural as well, deliveries were rather hard to get and at times still are. When we got a P.O. box most, not all the problems went away. All we have is what they call a 911 address and nothing else.

dtknowles
09-15-2015, 06:22 PM
My brother got a new address for his house, it used to be RFD XX Box XXX but now they named the road and gave him an house number. It had something to do with 911 service.

Tim

mjwcaster
09-15-2015, 09:27 PM
I used to have this issue when I lived in the country before 911 addresses.
I just used to tell the vendor to ship it out with the address I gave them, it will get here.
Phone number out of one town, mailing address from another (and I was well out of that town) fire protection from the township and I didn't exist on any online database.
Had to give the sheriff directions 3 times to get to the place, and it worked better if you told them
'past the falling down barn on the curve with the cow in the middle of the road, take the next right on the gravel road continue past the falling down lean to ...'

Have you tried verifying your address with USPS?

They may have changed something.

bubba.50
09-15-2015, 09:53 PM
we too got changed from rt2 addresses to 911 addresses a few years back. no problems so far from either the p.o. or u.p.s. or fed-ex except that for some reason ups & fed-ex now come in from the other direction & sometimes hafta back-up to the driveway. still occasionally get a piece of mail with the old rt2 address so, I don't know what the fuss was about.

oneokie
09-15-2015, 10:10 PM
Have that problem occasionaly. Tell them that the shipping and billing address is the same. Only current issue with address is with Ma Bell. They say they have to have a 911 address to sent repair tech's out. Tech will call asking for directions, yet they have no trouble sending their monthly bill to my address.
Latest fiasco was with Sears home delivery. Spent over 30 minutes on the phone with the delivery driver talking him to the correct location. When they were leaving, the driver asked how to get to the adjoining town that he had driven through on his way to my location.

nicholst55
09-16-2015, 06:08 PM
I have the exact same problem when ordering from Brownells. Their software insists that my address doesn't exist, and tries to send my order somewhere else - that I don't live. If I call, they will manually input my address and everything is just fine - for that one order. The next time I have to do it all again. I've contacted them and discussed this repeatedly, and they really don't seem to care. I guess that's how Pete (Brownell) treats customers of 35+ years. Well Pete, I really don't care either; I can get anything you sell from someone else. It's really a shame, because Brownells used to be the benchmark in customer service.

Goatwhiskers
09-16-2015, 07:33 PM
I placed an order on line today and their computer wanted Louisiana as LA., not La. GW

Kent Fowler
09-17-2015, 10:58 AM
I got calls from 3 different census officials telling me I didn't live where I live and that I should find out where I really lived as they were quite convinced I did not live where I live. One of them suggested I find a close neighbor and find out from them if I lived where I live. These are the people getting paid with our tax dollars.

foesgth
09-17-2015, 11:17 AM
I have had that problem and I live in a very non-rural area. I find that if I use Street instead of St. the software can't find me. The same thing happens if I spell out the state instead of using the proper USPS abbreviation.

rockrat
09-17-2015, 11:22 AM
We have had problems since they changed to a 911 address. Changed our street name and numbers. Fedex was the worst. They would call, saying our address was incorrect and they couldn't deliver. Would tell them to contact UPS, as they just delivered a package yesterday!! This went on for 2 years till, I guess, they updated their computers.
Won't even get into the ways my name gets mis-spelled!!

dtknowles
09-17-2015, 11:30 AM
There is where you know you live and where the rest of the world thinks you live. If you want to deal with the rest of the world then you need to accept their frame of reference. If you don't care, you can ignore them. Postal abbreviations for state names were standardized with two characters both capitalized and no period more than 20 years ago. Do you use the zip code or don't you like that either.

I used to live on Zions Hill and it was that way for many decades but they changed it to Zions Hill Road and added the people who live farther out of town to Zions Hill Road when they used to live on what we called the Old Ripley Road. Their postal address were RFD.

I imagine that thousands of people got their address changed to Martin Luther King Avenue from a variety different older street names. I wonder how you could live somewhere and not know that they changed your street address? Streets and roads get renamed all the time and whether you like it or not you address is the new one.

If you travel down to the corner or cross road, is there a street sign and what does it say? If you look at a recently published map or Google Maps, what does it say?

Tim

dtknowles
09-17-2015, 11:37 AM
Sorry, I reread some posts including mine and my tone was too hostile. It might be that some people know their new address but the delivery people have bad data base entries.

Tim

mjwcaster
09-17-2015, 12:16 PM
Data base entries, now that can be fun.

In IL when Concealed carry started, the state had the bright idea of using 2 different databases, one international to auto fill in your address.

I had one student who we could not get her address typed in, it auto-selected addresses from France and Belgium. Finally clicked fast enough to beat the auto-fill in.

Then they would cross check it against another database and tell you your address was incorrect.
But they were the ones who picked the address in the first place!

Some times it wanted things abbreviated, others spelled out.
Things like 'county', some addresses needed county spelled out, others would fail if you spelled it out, for addresses IN THE SAME COUNTY.
Or St vs Saint, different addresses in the same town needed to be entered differently.
It was lots of fun trying to outguess the inconsistencies in that system.

The best was they would(still) fail your application if you used lower case for things like your middle initial.
Case sensitive verification, with no warnings.

And other times you didn't know if they system was in the process of crashing or not, sometimes it worked Ok, others it would keep failing. Take a smoke break and come back the system was down.


And we get to pay $150 each to deal with this system.

montana_charlie
09-17-2015, 01:41 PM
'past the falling down barn on the curve with the cow in the middle of the road, take the next right on the gravel road continue past the falling down lean to ...'
I say, "Go a mile north of the elk farm, then east until you hit the end of the road."

dtknowles
09-17-2015, 07:31 PM
I say, "Go a mile north of the elk farm, then east until you hit the end of the road."

You could always just give them Lat. and Long.

Tim

lancem
09-17-2015, 07:55 PM
Same problem living in the 60 miles south of no where... FedEx sent me an email saying I couldn't use their free tracking service because I had a commercial address. Called the 800 number and talked to someone in Bangladesh who told me I needed to contact the USPS because they are the ones that they get their info from and I needed to straighten it out with USPS. Needless to say FedEx fell even further down my trash list, I have one driver that won't deliver to my house because "it's too far away", if you can believe that. I'm wondering isn't that his job??? Figure if I complain I'll never see any of my packages! Luckily a friend lives on the highway which is "close enough" to deliver too...

As far as not a good address goes, I tried buying stamps from USPS on line and couldn't because of "address wasn't good"... mailman delivers everyday though.... Madness...

MaryB
09-17-2015, 09:10 PM
If they are shipping USPS it won't let you over ride, if the address isn't in their system they reject it. Welcome to the modern age of computers!


I used to have this issue when I lived in the country before 911 addresses.
I just used to tell the vendor to ship it out with the address I gave them, it will get here.
Phone number out of one town, mailing address from another (and I was well out of that town) fire protection from the township and I didn't exist on any online database.
Had to give the sheriff directions 3 times to get to the place, and it worked better if you told them
'past the falling down barn on the curve with the cow in the middle of the road, take the next right on the gravel road continue past the falling down lean to ...'

Have you tried verifying your address with USPS?

They may have changed something.

Mal Paso
09-17-2015, 09:19 PM
Google couldn't find me either. The UPS database which others seem to use has me listed. USPS and Fedex know where I am. Google is expanding into areas where they are not competent.

historicfirearms
09-17-2015, 09:24 PM
OK, I talked to my postmaster today and she looked up my address on her computer. It is exactly the way I have been writing it for decades. So why am I having problems recently? No one knows.
When I asked the postal clerk if she could tell me my correct address, she said "I don't know where you live."
The postmaster said that if you enter her address into a GPS, it will direct you to the middle of a lake.

leeggen
09-17-2015, 11:47 PM
We live in one county but have an address from the next county with a differant city postal service, have a differant city phone #. Had a computer tech argue with me about where I lived he finally told me he could not come fix the computer if I didn't know where I lived. Needless to say I called the support back and told them what happen and another tech called and told me exactly where I lived. UPS has a notice come up on their delivery truck telling them to go to a text that tells them where we live. By address they never could find us, our road was not on the gps map yet, only took 10 years to get there.
CD

possom813
09-18-2015, 05:52 AM
For the first time, I can sympathize.

We just moved, a few weeks ago, into the middle of nowhere. 3 houses on a dead-end road. All on 1-3 acre tracts/lots. Across the road is thousands of acres of pastureland and forests. At the deadend, is thousands of acres of forests and rivers. Behind the houses, you guessed it, thousands of acres of pastureland and forest. One neighbor behind us about a mile or so. Another neighbor on the corner of the turn-off onto our road.

You put our address in, it won't register our address, and the road comes up on the map, but in a town almost 30 miles away. Our mailbox address is in another town, about 30 miles the other direction, and the school district is another town about 8 miles away.


I feel I should mention, our mailbox isn't in the same county as the house and neither are in the same county as the gps...

KCSO
09-18-2015, 01:12 PM
Same thing happened to me and the Post Office said they updated something and missed my address. They had to update me in their computer.

Geezer in NH
09-18-2015, 02:53 PM
I am rural know the UPS driver, USPS delivery man, FedEx driver by names. (have coffee with them on many occasions) When not home for packages they put them in the garage so they don't get wet and stamp my signature on the delivery sheet with the stamp left their for them.

One driver told my 10 year old on an ammo shipment "get your wagon this stuff is heavy" Truly glad we live in the boonies!

Addresses get screwed up by the computers used but the stuff gets here same as usual.

SSGOldfart
09-20-2015, 11:56 AM
OK, I talked to my postmaster today and she looked up my address on her computer. It is exactly the way I have been writing it for decades. So why am I having problems recently? No one knows.
When I asked the postal clerk if she could tell me my correct address, she said "I don't know where you live."
The postmaster said that if you enter her address into a GPS, it will direct you to the middle of a lake.
Because most shipping company are using GPS to tell the driver were to go.