in the ancient days

B. is applying for Social Security and Medicare and is going through the stage where she submits the forms and then they bounce them back for some reason, and she resubmits them and they get bounced back again, etc. Now they need her health coverage records from the beginning of her employment with the company; the problem is that the company doesn't have them back that far (partly because they've changed HR services over the years).

Searching for old records of this kind reminds me ... one of my financial accounts included a warning that, if you don't contact them for three years, your account will be sent over to the state Unclaimed Property Division. So I thought I should look myself up there and see if there was anything. And there was! It was only some $16, and the name of the entity that owed it to me was unfamiliar, and it was very very old. I don't recall seeing a date on it, but the address it had for me was the PO Box I used when I was at university, 40+ years ago.

Filling out the form to retrieve this munificence required a lot of proof of identity and proof of my current address of the kind I was used to when I had to get my driving license replaced. But the one that stuck me was: proof that I had received mail at the address I had at the time. Uh-oh. I checked, and my old bank statement files don't go back that far. I've got some personal letter files from those days, but I didn't usually save envelopes. I might have some of my old SF magazines, and they might have mailing labels still on them, but I don't want to dig those out.

Eventually, success. I looked in the folder in which I dump obsolete IDs, and there was my driving license from those days, with the PO Box given as my address. I'd forgotten just how hard I was avoiding getting mail at the house where I lived. (The mail slot was kind of irregular, and ...) So I photocopied that and sent it in, and we'll see if it works. If not, I'm only out $16.