Merry Christmas, and best wishes for 2005; but ...

[fivemack]

I'm sure Christmas cards are not intended to fill the writer with gloomy thoughts of entropy.

But as I write them, I realise that there are lots of people who I know well on IRC and on Livejournal, but of whose postal address I have no good idea. Sometimes I remember I've seen a change-of-address on LJ, but it'll be friends-only so unGooglable, and will have passed beyond the skip=50 barrier so become almost impossible to browse to.

At least those are people who write about what they're doing, so I feel in touch with them, and hope that, when not on Saturn, I write enough about my life that they feel some degree of contact with me. I can offer them a merry Christmas and my best wishes for 2005 here, even if I can't find postal addresses, and our Livejournal posts tell them I still exist and know they exist, which is really the only other function of Christmas cards.

But there are people I knew from school and from Oxford, who I really don't want to rationalise as having forgotten entirely, but of whom all the information I have is a three-year-old mobile number, a four-year-old street address, and a vague idea of who they were working for in 1999. Whether separately or together, these data are about as useful as three-year-old mince pies, four-year-old satsumas and a vague recollection of what someone got for Christmas in 1999; people move houses, move jobs and move phones more often than that, and mail seldom forwards.

Maybe my cunning anti-SAD purchase of three desk lamps with bright compact-fluorescent bulbs was inadequate, and I should get more of them.

Comments

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

What you need is to save LJ COAs as memories under a heading like 'contact meme'. The contact meme was a useful one; where you (and hopefully all your friends) put whatever contact details you like in a friends-locked post.

[tkb.livejournal.com]

I did discover today a development that could eventually help one to keep in touch with Oxonians (although it may be too late to help our generation): the University is (finally) introducing a mail forwarding service for alumni, with addresses of the form firstname.lastname@college.oxon.org. (More information is at http://www.oxon.org.) It's currently for those graduating in 2004, but they intend to extend it to all alumni.

Another suggestion

[redbird]

Several casual acquaintances on my friends list have set up polls with a single fill-in-the-blank question, answers visible only to the poller: "Please give me your mailing address if you'd like a holiday card" Since I don't send holiday cards and thus don't solicit them from casual acquaintances, I haven't answered those polls, but it seems to be a sensible approach.

Re: Another suggestion

[meirion.livejournal.com]

not too useful if only 2 people on one's f'list fill it in, though :-( although at least i feel absolved from the need to send lots of cards, i guess ;-)

-m-

[helenbr.livejournal.com]

For most of my cards to people from school/university I seem to be relying on the fact that though their addresses probably are fairly dynamic, I expect their parents' to be stable and am sending their cards there. That depends on one having their parents' addresses of course, but luckily I do seem to for most of them.

Another alternative (though it may be a bit late for this year) would be to contact the people one was still in contact with and try and combine resources with them to try and locate the missing people. I'm not sure how much I'd trust it to be up to date either but I do get sent Old Girl information from school which gives you change of address information from people, although I think it only gives you changes so you have to have kept all the old ones to have the original data for people who haven't moved. Anyway, I am sure your school would do something similar, if not more useful, if you could get hold of it.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I know I haven't kept my school up to date with my address -- I haven't kept my driving license up to date with my address, which I think, at least if I ever drove on it, is actually illegal.

My school sends notes saying they only need another £400,000 to finish renovating the music school to my parents' address; they forward them to me, and after a somewhat circuitous journey (as, knowing my school, my parents' address and my own, you will realise) they come to me. Generally they then proceed briskly to the recycling box.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Belated Merry Christmas to you too. I lost jvvw for several years until I found LJ...so I understand the whole losing-addresses-thing. (And addedentry and jiggery_pokery only heard from me about once a year, namely at Christmas...*grin*)

I love LJ.