How quickly spam comes…

On Wednesday, June 27, land got transferred into our name. However, despite the deed clearly naming us “Peter S. Cooper, Jr.” and “Jessica Jane Cooper”, the registry of deeds indexed us under “Peter S. Cooper” and “Jessica Jane”, omitting the final part of each of our names. I don’t think that this is really a big deal, since it’s just the indexing to find us and not the legal name of ownership (as far as my understanding goes).

Two days later, on Friday, June 29, at my parent’s house (next door), arrives a letter from Pioneer Oil, addressed to “Jessica Jane” and “Peter Cooper”, labeled with “Welcome to your new home”. As far as I can tell, they must get a data feed of new land transfers and try to market to them, assuming that land transfers must mean a new house, or something like that. We received similar postal spam when getting the land that our house is on. The fact that it went next door is somewhat interesting, but that was probably the only address listed on the deed. I also found it interesting that the names on it were hand-written and that it was metered with full $0.41 first-class postage. (I of course, wrote “Refused” on it and put it back.)

So, I’ve put in my parent’s mailbox today a temporary change of address form, for 6 months, for “Jessica Jane”, to go from 190 Berry Corner Rd. (my parents’ house) to 194 Berry Corner Rd. (our house). Since it’s temporary, we won’t get the slew of mailings from people the post office sends permanent address changes to. Since it’s a change of address, Standard Mail being sent to “Jessica Jane” at 190 will be discarded instead of forwarded. And if first-class mail gets sent to “Jessica Jane” at 190, it will be forwarded to us at 194, but we can refuse it and it will actually get sent back to the sender. (After all, there’s nobody here with last name “Jane”.)