Historical February 1989 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
If you live in the 6000 or 6100 blocks of Washington, you may have been missing your mail. Specifically, you are probably missing bills—telephone bills, gas card bills, other charge account bills. You may—if you’re very lucky—be missing catalogues. Of course, if you are like the rest of us, you don’t pay bills you haven’t received. It’s enough of a challenge to pay the ones you do receive.
So what happens next?
The creditor calls you—wondering why you haven’t made a payment in several months. Maybe they are even nice, saying that mail has been repeatedly returned to them and why have you disappeared?
After saying that you are where you have always been, it comes out that your mail has been going to Berkeley, zip code 63134. TOTAL CONFUSION!!!
For some reason unknown to the companies, the Wellston (63112) post office, and the Berkeley post office, some computer bank has taken it upon itself to redirect our 6000 and 6100 blocks of Washington to their counterparts in North County. What can you do? Become irritated, but at whom?
For this writer, this has been happening off and on for about a year and a half. I got it straightened out once by notifying all the creditors that there was this weird situation, and they all manually put the correct zip code into their computers with instructions to ignore any 63134 changes.
However, that lasted only about nine months, and it has gotten off again.
From reports of other neighbors, this is a problem up and down the two blocks. What can we do? Notify all creditors, companies, etc. of the confusion, letting them know that you are still at zip code 63112.
If you are happy missing catalogues, hope they don’t figure out what is going on. You might want to have a credit report run to see if there are late payments charged against you.
If there are, write the creditors and the credit unions with the explanation. Naturally, if you find out why this is happening to us, please let the rest of us know, either through this paper or call Nancy Farmer at the Skinker-DeBaliviere Community Council office, 862-5122, and somehow we’ll get the word out.
The rest of the neighborhood, count your blessings. Who knows where your mail might go next
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, February 1989.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1989_02.pdf, printed page(s) 7; PDF page(s) 7.
