Today we had the strangest experience.
It occurred to us this morning that we never got around the changing the address on our FedEx account, an account we've had for probably 25 years. We haven't used it much over the last year, which is why we forgot to change from our old to our new address.
So I decided to call and change our address. After a peppy and extensive artificial intelligence phone tree, I finally got connected to a nice young customer service representative and explained the situation. Naturally he needed some information to verify our account.
After the usual questions (account number, prior address, etc.), he said he would need to ask us some multiple-choice questions about our history to verify we are legitimately who we say we are. Okay, whatever.
For the first question, he asked which of the following addresses we had previously lived at. He listed four addresses – one of which was ours, but from 31 years ago! Seriously, it was the address of a rental house Don and I lived in for a few months immediately after we were married. That was in 1990.
For the second question, he asked which business name was associated with us. He gave several options, one of which was our dba ("doing business as") name, so that was easy peasy.
For the third question, he asked about a previous town in which [First Name] Lewis lived.
Huh? Who is [First Name] Lewis?
Don happened to walk into the house at this juncture, and since I had the phone on speaker, he heard the name. "That was my stepmother," he said, puzzled.
I should explain Don's parents divorced when he was in high school. Just before he entered the Navy in 1975, his father remarried a woman named [First Name], who then took on her new husband's last name (Lewis). Don's father passed away while Don was in the Navy, so he hardly knew his stepmother. Certainly they weren't close enough to stay in touch after his dad died. In short, Don hadn't been in contact with this woman for something like 45 years. How on earth was he supposed to know where she'd lived during the last four decades?
The FedEx representative said he couldn't "move on" to change our address until we answered the question about Mrs. Lewis's address; and no, there was no alternate question he could ask us.
We told him we would have to hang up and see if we could find information about Don's stepmother's whereabouts, and the rep said that was fine.
We hung up the phone, and Don immediately started some frantic online research, trying to find out which of the 80-odd women in the State of California who shared the same name as his stepmother from 45 years ago was the right person. This was assuming she hadn't remarried and assumed a new name. This was also assuming she wasn't deceased. After all, she would be well into her 90s by now.
I thought the whole thing was stupid beyond belief. What – if we couldn't find out what town this [First Name] Lewis had lived in at some point since 1977 or so, we would never be able to change our account address? On what planet?
The whole thing took on a surreal and frankly creepy quality. How on earth could FedEx pull an address out of their files we haven't lived at for 31 years, long before we got an account with them? And creepier still, how on earth did they fish up the name of a woman with only the most tangential association with Don dating back to the 1970s?
Unsurprisingly, Don wasn't able to locate any information about his long-gone stepmother. I decided to call FedEx once again and try changing our address. After I'd waded through their extensive phone trees, I was connected to another customer service representative, a charming woman who recorded our new address without any problem, then wished us a "blessed day" at the end of our call. Easy peasy.
So what was up with these weird multiple-choice questions from our distant past, just to change an address? I have no idea. It was bizarre.
