I ordered a new iPod and went to fill in the delivery information. All my mail is sent to my PO Box (we don't have the option of home mail delivery in my town) and for bigger-ticket stuff like that, I kind of like the security. Unfortunately FedEx would not let me enter a PO Box, so I had to enter my home address. Sigh, fine.
The day it was supposed to be delivered, they didn't even try to bring it to my house. They just left it--guess where--at the post office. What the...argh.
Many years ago, my car broke down in a tiny town (population about 200) in the middle of nowhere. Several people stopped to help, including a couple who apologized that they had no spare room for me, assured me that the rooms for rent over the local bar were quite respectable (they were), and insisted I join them for an evening at a town picnic in the next county.
I wanted to thank them, so I asked for their address, saying I wanted to be proper and send a thank you note. (I actually wanted to send a gift.)
They didn't know their own address. Everyone in town had a post office box and the postmistress knew who had what box, so townfolks just gave out their address as "John Smith, Tinytown, [state, ZIP code]." These nice people, who had lived there all their lives, had never bothered to learn their PO Box number. Besides, you don't need to send us any thanks, we were happy to help out.
Fortunately, I spotted a magazine in their house with the correct address on the label and I was able to send them a food specialty from my home town that I knew would be very hard for them to find.
On the travel board where I hang out, we get that geographic confusion a lot. The most recent that I recall was someone who wanted to take 2 or 3 days to visit the Grand Canyon--departing from Chicago. It would take about 6 hours just to fly to a nearby city and drive to the Canyon, so the round trip is almost 2 days in itself.
This map is helpful in showing people from Western Europe the scale issue.
