I finally got around to facing the task of calling Social Security to record my change of address. This is supposedly of great importance because, supposedly, they occasionally send a query just to see if a recipient is still alive and therefore whether they ought to be depositing a monthly payment.
The thing is, as anyone who has had to deal with SSA knows, it is not that easy to complete this simple task. And if you live on the other side of the world, there are extra bonus problems. For instance, you guys in the States are on the whole wrong time and whole wrong day--which means that I must try to call either late at night or early in the morning in order to reach the office during working hours there. And of course once you get through, you're looking at a long period of elevator music while you wait on the line. Sure, you can request a call back instead, but this is really quite an iffy proposition in Indonesia. Better to just sit out the wait.
Sit it out I did, and the wait turned out to be about forty minutes--only to find, when a representative finally answered, that my change of address from last year, which I had also waited forty minutes to record, had not been recorded. (No wonder I did not receive a single piece of mail for more than a year). This address failure caused a certain amount of confusion and I was asked to give previous addresses. Even those turned out to be wrong, but one was just close enough for approval to finish the new change.
Whether this change actually takes will be a question for the future. The good news, I guess, is that I don't plan to move again before dying, so I suppose that if I don't receive any mail for another year I can try again. Something to look forward to (not).
The thing is, as anyone who has had to deal with SSA knows, it is not that easy to complete this simple task. And if you live on the other side of the world, there are extra bonus problems. For instance, you guys in the States are on the whole wrong time and whole wrong day--which means that I must try to call either late at night or early in the morning in order to reach the office during working hours there. And of course once you get through, you're looking at a long period of elevator music while you wait on the line. Sure, you can request a call back instead, but this is really quite an iffy proposition in Indonesia. Better to just sit out the wait.
Sit it out I did, and the wait turned out to be about forty minutes--only to find, when a representative finally answered, that my change of address from last year, which I had also waited forty minutes to record, had not been recorded. (No wonder I did not receive a single piece of mail for more than a year). This address failure caused a certain amount of confusion and I was asked to give previous addresses. Even those turned out to be wrong, but one was just close enough for approval to finish the new change.
Whether this change actually takes will be a question for the future. The good news, I guess, is that I don't plan to move again before dying, so I suppose that if I don't receive any mail for another year I can try again. Something to look forward to (not).
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