Cat Who Laughed

I really hate to jump back into blogging with a rant. I had a great Artweeks, met a local family that shares my surname who bought one of my prints – pleasant, interesting topics abound. And I will get to them. But honestly, why blog if you can’t occasionally give voice to the soul-destroying frustration that results when you try to reason with a large corporation. Name and shame, that’s what I say. (At least until m’learned friends see fit to get involved. That’s lawyers, for you stateside readers.)

OK. The story so far… I have had, for many years, an American Express card. Amex saw fit to give me this card when I was a just-graduated fine art major in the United States. Leaving that inanity aside, we move on to the present day, where I am now living in the UK (since 2002). Not, and this becomes crucial later, a US city called Oxford UK. Not a country called ENGLAND G, BR either (that one’s for you, Bank of America.) Recently, when trying to use said card online and filling in my billing address, I have been greeted with the error message “Incorrect Billing Address”. This seems to happen only on one particularly fussy website, but hey, my address should be correct in all situations, not be a good approximation that some sites might accept through poor practice. So I log on, check my account details, and sure enough, my billing address on file is some mutant hybrid of my UK address smooshed into the template of a US postal address. The website even warns that your address may appear formatted for the US postal service. An AMEX customer service rep on the phone admitted that they could not deal with my UK address. This crime against data may be a convenient workaround for someone, but it sure as &%^$ does not do me any good when I am trying to do an online transaction with my actual address. It also strikes me as the kind of muddle that is in no way conducive to “national security”. This is what I see when I look at my account details:

Address Line 1:<blank>

Address Line 2: Here they have my correct number and street, but on the wrong line

City: Oxford UK

State: <blank>

Zip Code: Here we have the first *5* characters of my *6* digit UK postal code.

Helpfully, as I once declined to give them my work phone number, it has been entered by someone as 777-777-7777. I can only guess what it would look like if I had given the full international phone number.

I understand that the US government seems bent on discouraging US citizens from living in “foreign” countries by taxing them anywhere in the world. Forever. I had until now not appreciated that large US companies seem to have jumped on the bandwagon and made it virtually impossible to keep your account when you move abroad. People – this is not quantum physics. If you are going to allow someone to keep an account when they move overseas, it might, and this is just an idea here, be a good idea to figure out how to format their address properly. Earth to USA, not everybody lives in a State. And remember, this is a specifically Travel Related Company we are talking about. It doesn’t inspire confidence for the next time you lose your travellers’ cheques, does it? I have a related gripe about how US political campaigns also conveniently forget that they might have supporters not currently living in the land of the “free” but who still, in hopes of rendering the political situation less noxious, bother to vote. But that will have to wait for another day.