Another friend of mine who is in a different ward recently left to serve a mission as well. Unfortunately I'm not in his unit so I don't get the privlidge of reading the most recent address his parents will keep posted on their ward bulletin board. I'll be leaving on my own mission soon as well, and won't have the opportunity of calling his parents up to inquire if I have the most recent address they last heard about when I want to write a letter.
It would be nice if the mission itself were to update a directory of their Elders' current mailing addresses through a website or something that friends / family back home could login and check, perhaps through the local unit websites for their home ward. Of course the clerk back home can update it in MLS and have it show up on the website, but how would the clerk discover when the address changed if even the parents can't always keep up with it? There needs to be a better way.
I'm also a bit concerned about being able to receive my own mail while I'm on my mission. Unfortunately I'm going into this on the virge of the age 26 cut off deadline, and already have pleanty of complications in life that I have to be responsible for. I was running a business when I was 19/20, but finally decided to close that down and put in my papers. I own a house, and decided to rent it out to pay for the mission. So, this is going to be a little more complicated than most of the 19 year olds serving. I arranged with the local bank to let the tenants make their rent payment there. The taxes, insurance, mortgage payment, water, sewer & garbage bill (included in the rent), and even payments to the local ward mission fund are all setup through the bank's online bill payment service. But, I still have to make sure that the rent actually got deposited and funds are available before allowing all those electronic payments to come out of the account.
Between going off to college for different semesters, moving out on my own, later buying a house, and the joys of running a business for 4 years amdist all of that, I believe I have changed my mailing address 10 times since I left Mom & Dad. It's an absolute nightmare to notify every possible person or company you've ever been aquainted with as to your updated address. I still would be receiving occasional mail from people or accounts that got overlooked at my old address 3 addresses ago while most of it was going to the new one. Every once in a while such a missed piece of mail turned out to be important enough to cause grief.
Last year I grew frustrated one day when it (again) occurred to me that I had missed getting up to the post office before they closed. On a whim of frustration I just wildly typed in "I wish I could get my postal mail online" into Google, and suprisingly discovered that such a service actually exists. Since then I've been using Earth Class Mail (www.earthclassmail.com) to get all of my postal mail delivered through a website as PDF files. This has really helped me cut through all of the clutter and get organized. I have been hoping to keep my Earth Class Mail address as my permanent mailing address for the rest of my life, as it's just way too much hassle to keep changing when I move (and I can easily see myself moving at least a few more times in the next few years, even if I weren't going on a mission.)
Now I'm going on a mission and don't know what will become of my mail. I hope that I am called to serve somewhere in which the mission president would allow me to use a library computer or something of that variety on P-day, especially considering I need to know if the money is in the account yet in order to pay for the cost of the mission itself.
The idea of having a website or something where members back home could look up the current address of their missionaries in the field would be helpful for personal coorespondence, but that wouldn't really work for those of us serving that have several accounts / statements to attend to from various businesses back home. Really if access to computers were more prevailent in the mission field, something similar to what I have now would be the ideal solution -- just have it all scanned and available online as PDFs. Your thoughts?
-Jeff Phillips
