What Were They Thinking of!!

Our house in Tucson has a romantic sounding street address: Placita de la Intriga, or "place of intrigue." When it was likely that we would want to buy our house, I was thankful that we didn't have young children who would have to learn how to spell the address, but didn't think much more of it. Now I am ready to petition for a change of street name! Here's the trouble. It turns out that not only Kindergarteners and first graders have trouble with the spelling. I often have to spell out the street when giving out my address. It's spelled like it sounds, except the Spanish worries people. It's not as easy as 3433 119th to spell out, by any means.

The real problem with our street name has just become obvious to us. Our street address is about 25 characters long in a text field in a computer program. We just tried to order something from Costco.com and couldn't because their program would not accept such a long address. Our credit card company was worried that we were victims of fraud when they noticed our attempt to place our order to our AZ address. It took multiple phone calls and a couple of hours to get the business straightened out. At the end, a Costco.com employee told me just to place my orders over the phone because nothing could be done to correct the problem with our long address!