Help me Alex Goldman
It’s not Reply All but instead Return to Sender
If you haven’t listened to Reply All yet, stop reading this and go do it. It’s hilarious, witty, whimsical, and very millennial. It’s nominally about The Internet but as the Guardian says, it’s really an “unfailingly original exploration of modern life and how to survive it”. I’m well behind in terms of episodes, but every so often I’ll binge, usually on road trips (haven’t had many of those recently for obvious reasons).
Anyway. The show has essentially 3 types of episodes: the ostensibly regular episodes, which are narratives about how the internet and people shape each other. And the recurring segments: Yes Yes No, and Super Tech Support. Super Tech Support are my favourite — as a nominally tech-y person with a problem solving bent, I can’t get enough of the bizarre wormholes that develop from seemingly inconspicuous tech problems.
So here’s my scenario. I’ve lived in my current house for (I think) 6 years. That’s a fairly long time in a rental market. For the little while we got mail addressed to other people, as you’d expect for a house that recently changed hands. Sometimes we’d write “return to sender” and post it back (though not as fantastically creative as postwhisperer). Sometimes we’d be lazy and trash it (sorry, previous tenants!). Some mail was slightly more odd than others, and we seemed to get a lot, but sure, whatever, apparently quite a few people have lived at this address before. So far, so normal.
I can’t remember the first time I noticed this particular letter. I assume it was fairly early on, but as I said, getting incorrect mail wasn’t uncommon. We probably ignored it the first couple of times. And then one day I read the addressee properly. Here it is:
Yes. I got mail addressed to Mr T T Test.
Look, I’m a pretty accepting person. Some might say naive. I say open-minded 😛. So I give it the benefit of the doubt, and I send it back “return to sender”.
Next month we get another one. And the next month. And the next. At this point I’m not even really counting. It might not be every month (that feels like a lot?). I’ve retroactively assumed it was every month because at some point I got tired of getting them and I actually opened one. It’s a transaction bank statement. With (seemingly?) real transactions, albeit only 1 or 2 each month. And the letters they keep on a’coming.
So here’s our first working theory. Someone, in some IT department inside ANZ bank, is doing some testing. Makes sense, every software needs some test data. Make up a name (very creative, this one 🙄), add in some fake money (or real money because let’s be honest, Mr T T is not Mr Moneybags and only has $11 in his bank account 💸), fake a couple of transactions every month and away you go! Fake user with real transactions that you can test stuff on.
Except…why would you create test data in a production environment? Or alternatively, why does your test environment send real snail mail? These are truly questions to ponder for the ages.
To be fair, I get multiple copies of my company’s newsletter because at some point I made test accounts with different versions of my email address, and then forgot to delete them. So perhaps test data in a prod system isn’t that unusual. But this is a bank. A large bank. And, well, whoever has put in this test data hasn’t chosen their own home address for testing purposes. They’ve chosen mine.
What’s special about my home address? I suppose mysterious Mr X or Ms X in IT could have chosen my address completely at random. It could be entirely a coincidence that it’s me receiving these letters, and not the house down the road, or you, or my mother. It could be. But perhaps there is more to it than that. Let’s see if I can come up with a working theory about the address too.
One could argue that my home address is fairly generic. I’m not going to dox myself but my street address is about the equivalent of 1 King St (not exactly equivalent, but close enough). And it’s a house, so no apartment numbers adding to the mix. So let’s theorise that Mr X or Ms X in IT was struggling to come up with test data. We’ve already proven that his creative capability maxed out at Mr T T Test. He’s filling in the customer data to create his fake test user and he gets to the address field. Putting in my street address is pretty much the equivalent of naming your character Joe Smith and calling it a day.
So far, so good for my theory. It seems plausible. A little weird, but plausible. Except. The suburb field. Here’s where I get stuck. My street address may be generic, but my suburb is not. I don’t live in Smithtown, I don’t live in Hopeville. I don’t even live in the CBD (postcode X000 for most X) in case you were wondering if the postcode field came before the suburb field.
Mr X or Ms X in IT, whoever you are — after you’d picked my street address, why didn’t your test mail go to one of the other “1 King St” addresses? (Again, not my real address. But the point stands.)
So I googled. In fact I went one step further and opened Google Maps. There are at least 5 other locations with the same street name and number as me in my city. Apparently Google only wants to show me 5 results, not a full list, and I couldn’t be bothered working out another way to calculate how many there are. You see, it’s true. Google does make us millennials lazy.
But not that lazy when internet hilarity is at stake, because I checked further, and in fact there’s at least 5 different locations with my street name and number in EVERY STATE in Australia. So why mine? (Unless all of them are receiving test mail. That would be hilarious and I hope it’s true. Please call me if you are receiving mail for Mr T T Test and we can commiserate about all the things we can’t buy with his measly $11.)
Here’s some other theories that my friends and I came up with after I regaled them with the above:
- My suburb is the first one in the list when you search for my street number and name. This was a really good working theory for about 5 whole minutes until Google Maps helped us out again.
- My home address is close to a very obvious address — eg. the head office of the bank in question — and was mistyped. Funny, but also not true.
- Secret Option C?
If you have suggestions, please HMU.
This is a rather amusing anecdote so far. Because I’m the kind of person who finds broken systems and processes annoying, I went to the effort of calling ANZ. “How can I stop receiving this mail please?” I spoke to an overseas call centre so, whilst I attempted to explain the hilarity of the situation, I don’t think that part registered. But I managed to get a different postal address to return this letter to, which in theory would remove my address from this account and I’d stop getting mail for Mr T T Test.
I imagined that would be the end of the story. I’d never really know for sure how my address ended up on a test account in ANZ’s database. That would be a boring ending, and TBH I probably wouldn’t have written about it. But then…
…something even weirder happened.
Literally the following week, I checked my mailbox again. The ANZ letter is still sitting on my kitchen bench, waiting for me to head to the post office. We have a surprising amount of mail today — like all good millennials, we do everything online and we don’t get much snail mail— but today there are 9 envelopes(!). Only one is addressed to a member of our household. Two seem like legitimate incorrectly addressed mail.
And the other 7, well, you can see for yourself.
7 identical envelopes, with different names:
- redacted Test
- redacted
- Rev redacted
- Test User (x 2!)
- Test Test
- Amil redacted
WTF.
I’ve redacted the names that might possibly (in a very strange world) be legitimate. It’s not just one letter to Mr T T Test. Not just one letter to Test User.
7 individual envelopes addressed to 6 seemingly different test users.
I’m already laughing as I open one of the letters and announce it to my housemate. Inside is a letter from UBank with “Important terms and conditions changes”. Each of the 7 is identical, aside from the name. And they all have my house address on them.
Someone, somewhere, is playing a big cosmic trick on me. I’m haunted by a snail mail poltergeist. Punished by a biblical plague of letters. Ok 2020, a real plague wasn’t enough? Are we done yet?
And so we come to you, dear reader. What should I do with my 7 identical test letters? Why do banks even need to send test letters? If it is a test, how do they confirm it’s successful? Is there some kind of device monitoring my letterbox for successful completion of the create_test_mail() function? And most importantly — why my house? I was willing to write off one test letter (albeit recurring) as someone making up test data. But two different types of test mail from two different banks going to the same address?
I’m starting to believe that I am the egg.
Will there be a part 2? Who knows! Give me advice on what I should do next. And if you happen to know Alex Goldman, ask him if he wants to plumb the depths of the Australian banking system and postal service. I’m sure it would make a great episode.