I moved into my new place in mid-December and though I changed my address with work, I figured that my W-2 for my taxes would go to my old address. To my surprise, it got to my new address – but my former room-mate called and said that someone else’s from the university had ended up with my old address and went to my former apartment. He dropped it off to me with some other stuff the next day and I decided to hand deliver this to save this fellow employee some time.
I looked up her campus address and couldn’t figure out how my update of my address online could have triggered this error – since there didn’t seem to be any connection by name, department, or campus address. A little bit more digging and I realized that her employee number was one digit off from mine.
This wasn’t my fault, but I still felt a little bit responsible. So, I wrote up a note in case she wasn’t in her office and headed across campus. I finally found her department and the admin assistant at the desk. My one-digit neighbor wasn’t in and it turns out she taught at off campus locations and was almost never in. The admin assistant said she would call and email her to have her stop by – and then thanked me for making the trip. I’m glad I went to the extra effort to hand-deliver this – if it had just gone through campus mail there’s no telling how long it might have sat in an envelope on in her mailbox.
It will be interesting to see if I hear anything back on this one – or if anyone ever figures out what happened. One digit. That was all it took to mess things up.