Snail mail
One month before we left Holland, I started sending out letters notifying various companies and organisations of our new address. Back in the old days, the state-owned Post office (PTT) offered a service to redirect your mail to another address in Holland free of charge.
However, in these modern times, the company that handles the mail charges for this service. Not per address, but per person moving! We decided not to sponsor these crooks, and asked the new tenants of our house to redirect the few missed letters to Willemijn’s parents. They probably don’t know that you can simply scribble a new address on the envelope and mail it for free. So, they’ve reluctantly saved up everything they received that didn’t have their name on it (including junk mail and mail for several previous tenants), and now have a stack of one and a half kilos of mail waiting for us, and they want us to come and pick it up!
After calling our good old Rrrrrotbuurman who was dealing with the matter, we found out that the big stack of mail contains only two important pieces, the rest is marketing junk, mail that’s not even addressed to us, mail from companies that were slow in updating their address database.
Then there’s the Dutch Railways, who refuse to terminate our kortingskaart (reduction pass) before the end of the year, even though we’re living in New Zealand. And the ANWB (Triple A, AA, whatever it’s called in your country - it’s the Dutch motorists’ association) still sends us their appalling monthly “family oriented” magazine because our ANWB membership simply didn’t end yet. So, we can still travel cheaply by train and have our car fixed when it breaks down. In Holland…
One of the important letters is from NWO, the organisation that gave me the grant to do research in New Zealand!! You’d think that they, of all people, would know that we have moved.
