I live in Hamden CT, about 35 minutes from ARRL headquarters in Newington CT.

Several years ago they sent me an order blank for their Travel-Plus repeater directory CD. I filled it all in, including my current address, and mailed it to them along with payment. A couple of months passed and no CD. So I called them.

It seems the ARRL, in its glorious way, had in their records my previous address, a post office box, from a shipment some 20 years previous, and decided to send the CD there, rather than the address I supplied on the order form. It's interesting that the original order blank was sent to my current address, but not the actual item, so they had the correct address somewhere. It seems that when they get an order, they key in the callsign. If that's in their database, they just use the address that's already there, rather than the address supplied with the order, which in my case was different. I reamed the person an additional orifice and uttered a few "How can you be so stupid?". Eventually I got a replacement CD but it seems like the stupidity still lives on, as in the case of your handbook.

I had a similar shipping experience with another amateur radio supply company, now out of business, in that they sent the confirmation and tracking info to an old email address and I never got the item. Same situation: my callsign was in their database so they changed none of the information, that I provided on their web order screen, to properly notify me and ship the item. Laziness or just plain stupidity? How about a lot of both?