Thursday, March 19, 2009

Question

I am not sure if this is the right place to ask this question -- but hell, I need to ask somebody and I might as well ask it here.

I suddenly started receiving weekly issues of Time Out New York -- turns out someone had deemed me eligible for a free subscription. But the issue wasn't addressed to me. Sure - it had my correct address on it but the name was a mixture, let's just say that the first name wasn't mine.

But anyway. I moved 3 weeks ago and like a good citizen updated my address at the post office, which then immediately started delivering my magazines to my new place. Today I finally looked at the 3 issues of Time Out that had piled up and decided to take pity on the PO; I would update my address at Time Out. So I went to the website and clicked on "Subscriber Services", put in my subscriber number -- and what do I see? My new address was right there! Where do these guys get the data from? (I have updated my address at the few essential services I do need: my banks, amazon.com, etc so clearly its from one of those sources.)

But still -- isn't it strange that a magazine I didn't even subscribe to, that I started receiving out of the blue and which even spells my name wrongly, has a perfect information repository in place wherein they even update my address automatically? Whereas the magazine(s) I do subscribe to -- ha, now that's a whole new story.

Still - any guesses? What's Time Out's secret? Conspiracy theories welcome.

3 comments:

Mohit Gupta said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mohit Gupta said...

I can take a guess..

So you mentioned that you register with the post office to redirect your letters. Now when post office receives a letter in your name sent to your old address, they send the letter to your new address. In addition to this, they inform the sender of the letter about your new address. This is printed on the yellow redirection sticker (atleast thats the color in Cal) that the post office puts on your letter..

So checkout your Times Out and see if the post office informed them of your new address.

scritic said...

Mohit! Long time! Kaisa hai?

Oh, as far as I know, the yellow sticker doesn't say that they have informed the sender of my changed address. Rather it says that *I* have to inform the sender of my changed address (which was the reason I went to the TimeOut site to have the address changed).