"Home is where the address is"

As diehard baseball fans, my wife and I have no problem back home in Brooklyn, where she watches her hapless Mets on SNY on one TV, and I watch my beloved Yankees on YES on another. When at our vacation home in Florida, however, we can only watch our "home" teams when they are playing either the Florida Marlins or the Tampa Bay Rays. Once in a while, our teams are featured on ESPN, but the coverage is hardly sufficient for fan-addicts such as we.

Since our Brooklyn coverage is through DirectTV and Florida through Comcast, we cannot transfer our coverage as easily as, say, home delivery of the New York Times. The only solution was to buy the Major League Baseball "package," which gives you 80 (count 'em) games per week, including all the out-of-area contests involving the Mets and Yanks. Taking advantage of the "special early-bird discount price" (don't ask), we signed up. When it came time to view the games, I realized that neither of us had any idea of which channels the games were on, and my Comcast guide was hopelessly outdated. When I called the good folks at Comcast, they gave me the band of stations for the baseball package, and we were (almost) all set.

I then asked them if they would mail me two copies of their most current channel listings (which frequently change), and they readily agreed. When I started to give them our Florida address, they told me they already had it (indeed, I had to provide it to the voice robot in order to gain access to a human being), and then completed my sentence by providing our Brooklyn address, which we use for billing purposes. When I told them to please mail the schedules to our Florida address, they said they couldn't, as the addresses were computerized, and--unless we wanted to change our "official" address from Brooklyn to Florida--they'd have to mail the schedules to Brooklyn, something that would do neither of us any good.

How about, I suggested, they hand-address the schedules to our Florida residence (just this one time) and retain the Brooklyn address for all other correspondence. So sorry, I was told, our only option was to change addresses. Yes, I acknowledged, but then I wouldn't get the billing information in Brooklyn, where we still live most of the year. I then asked if I could change addresses for purposes of getting the schedules, and then, once received, change back to Brooklyn. Sure, they replied. After all, what could be easier. (By the way, I only received one of the requested two schedules, a penalty, I suppose, for "gaming"the system.)