Yeah, I forgot to mention. Mapquest apparently hates you. :-/

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It's very simple - if the city is "East Pittsburgh" you get the right address. If you say Pittsburgh, it defaults to Monroeville. There's a reason I include the city and the zip code when giving directions.

I guess I should start emphasizing it for the inattentive ;)

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that happened to us at my in-laws' house...apparently there was a 4 Maple Tree Ln in the same town (my in-laws' was 4 Maple Drive) and every time I'd try to mapquest it or something, it'd show the other address...

They also got our mail...

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Cambridge has a Madison Ave and a Madison Street. Each is exactly one block long, so numbers run from 1 to 60 on each of them. When I first moved here, I tried to find my house on the wrong one. Imagine my delight. And despite there not being a ${my house number} on the wrong street, all the mapping sites don't care and will merrily direct you to the wrong Madison if you don't specify.

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And here I am, a television junkie, and they don't call me.

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I know. It's crazy. TANJ indeed.

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That's so not fair. I watched TV all the time before I headed off to college, but did Nielsen call me? NO! ;_; I wanted my habits to matter.

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Everyone I know who's gotten the little booklet always seems to exaggerate their favorite shows to make up for the horrible dreck on 'popular' TV nowadays. I wonder what my habit of not watching says to them?

My parents never got called for this either, so I just think it's pretty rare :(

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They give savings bonds for that. dude, free savings bond!

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A friend's street in the UK had a similar problem. There was another street of the same name near, but not near enough.

One pizza delivery place had a central phone number for the country, and lots of separate places they'd dispatch them from. We called them, explained to them were we were, and reminded them of the town we were in. Everything's good. An hour later, no pizza. We call, ask about it. Oh, wrong depot. Can't find us. We explain again, telling them what town we're in, and what town we're _not_ in. Wait an hour. Call again. Guess what? Same thing!

So, we're not pleased. We're starving, and we're grouchy. We call again. I wasn't rude, but I wanted to know when we'd get pizza from them, and what they would do to make us happy. I didn't really demand anything specific, just something like satisfaction of some manner.

They finally managed to deliver our pizzas, and they also gave us as much money as the pizza would've cost - so the net result was around 3 hours of waiting, but we actually got paid money to eat their pizza. I was, of course, the brash American. They were all quiet, timid brits, so I think they would've just starved without my help :)

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Oh, Tao just reminded me of something they do here in Germany.

Like the UK, you need a TV license, whose funds go to the national broadcasters and so on. Not everybody has one, but it's assumed everybody has a TV. They can't just enter your house to look for a TV if you don't have a license. But what they will do is employ dirty tricks. They may knock on your door during, say, a popular TV show. If you open the door and they see a TV, you're in trouble. If they don't, they will apologize, and ask if they've interrupted your TV show. Anything to get you to admit that you own a TV - then they can demand that you pay the fees or they will come with the police and find your TV and make you pay a big fine.

In the UK they have TV detector vans, which search out the tell-tale 3.58MHz colorburst frequencies that a TV generates. Or at least, they did when TVs weren't that incredibly common - nowadays it's harder to do that because there are so many signals from various peoples' TVs near to the target.

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Now, that's something I always wondered about. What if you don't use your TV to watch television, just to play games and watch DVDs on? I suppose you still have to pay a license, just on the off chance you *might* turn on broadcast, right?

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