CRA

Oh, it's not just the utilities.  And it's not just Canada Post either.  Although Canada Post has contributed greatly to this mess.  Canada Post apparently, told the developer, and city hall, that the postal code ended in 5C9.  It doesn't.  So, when I went to my account, and went to update my address, and entered the correct postal code, CRA coughed on it, and wouldn't accept it.  So I had to call CRA.

CRA made this a painless process.  NOT!!!

First of all, they told me the information that I would need on hand to verify myself.  They lied.  When I called, and went through all the shenanigans to get to a point where they were going to put me through to an agent.  They told me the wait time would be an hour. Two hours later I finally got to speak to an agent.  (This becomes important, later.)  The agent was a very nice, compassionate, caring person.  Who asked for all kinds of things besides what CRA said they would ask for, in order to verify that I was who I was.  Taking considerable time in doing so.  (This becomes important, later.)

So, we started with the address change.  I told the agent that this might be a problem, since I had tried it with my account, and CRA wouldn't let me.  It had coughed, at the very beginning, on the postal code.  So I gave her the postal code, because that was what she wanted first.  (Obviously she was using exactly the same software that I was, and, predictably, got exactly the same result.)  She has better access than I do, and could override this, to a certain extent.  She was able to look up what CRA thought my postal code should be.  It's wrong, but she entered it anyway, and was then able to enter the rest of the new address.  Success!  One would think.  One would be wrong.

At this point she asked about phone numbers.  So I gave her the story leading to the fact that my old home phone number is now a cell phone.  She entered that and went straight on to bank information.  Hold on, I said, there is more information to be entered about the phone numbers.  Apparently she couldn't do that.  Or wouldn't do that.  So we verified that my bank information is still the same.  At this point, if I try to sign on with the bank, CRA probably will not let me sign on.  That's because the bank has my right postal code, and CRA has the wrong postal code.

So finally we were back to phone numbers.  And she started to ask me about phone numbers.  At which point CRA decided this phone call had gone on quite long enough, most of which was due to CRA not putting me through to an agent, and cut the agent off in mid sentence.  It was obviously the end of the day for CRA (which had happened during the long wait, and while the agent was asking all kinds of verification questions), so they just cut the call off.  And then asked me to take a survey.  To all of the points I answered completely unsatisfied.  Well, what would you do?