3 ms·

Why not you and your neigbor just give your address as Big pink house on Foo St. (#8-5-5) or Big red-and-yellow-striped house on Foo St. (#8-8-5) or whateve

by dheera 3y ago

Why not you and your neigbor just give your address as Big pink house on Foo St. (#8-5-5) or Big red-and-yellow-striped house on Foo St. (#8-8-5) or whatever colors they are? If they are the same color, repaint one of them. As a bonus, this will completely throw off all the automated data brokers, idiots that use "KYC" as an excuse to want to know where you sleep, etc. Alternatively put an apartment number on your house (there will be only one apartment, of course.) One of you will be 855 Foo St. Apt. 1 The other will be 885 Foo St. Apt. A

xp84 3y ago
This would work with only humans involved, but nearly everybody runs addresses through standardization now, and they would reject all of those as an incorrect address and usually require the user to enter a conforming one, including the (otherwise very clever) apartment number hack. This is the same thing that continuously requires me to use my "ZIP+4" for absolutely everything, even though as far as i can tell, there is zero point in ever using it unless one is literally doing metered US Mail.
- dheera 3y ago
  The trick is if your address is unreadable by the standardizers it gets printed as-is and it ends up with humans processing it. If you write "885 Foo St. (blue house)" it will get standardized to "885 Foo St." If you write "Blue house on Foo St. (eight eight five)" the standardizers will choke and it will be printed as-is.
  - xp84 3y ago
    I'm sure that sometimes happens successfully as you describe, but having worked in ecommerce for a long time, many larger retailers will throw addresses like that either back at the customer until they "fix it" or to a queue where customer service will attempt to "fix it" including by calling you. The carriers (like FedEx etc.) really like standardized addresses. So this could result in delays in getting your order.

by dheera 3y ago

xp84 3y ago

This would work with only humans involved, but nearly everybody runs addresses through standardization now, and they would reject all of those as an incorrect address and usually require the user to enter a conforming one, including the (otherwise very clever) apartment number hack. This is the same thing that continuously requires me to use my "ZIP+4" for absolutely everything, even though as far as i can tell, there is zero point in ever using it unless one is literally doing metered US Mail.

dheera 3y ago
The trick is if your address is unreadable by the standardizers it gets printed as-is and it ends up with humans processing it. If you write "885 Foo St. (blue house)" it will get standardized to "885 Foo St." If you write "Blue house on Foo St. (eight eight five)" the standardizers will choke and it will be printed as-is.
- xp84 3y ago
  I'm sure that sometimes happens successfully as you describe, but having worked in ecommerce for a long time, many larger retailers will throw addresses like that either back at the customer until they "fix it" or to a queue where customer service will attempt to "fix it" including by calling you. The carriers (like FedEx etc.) really like standardized addresses. So this could result in delays in getting your order.