Today’s strange technical support issue

I changed my email address with united.com several weeks ago. Today I receive some update or ad from them – sent to my old address. I log on to change the address and see that it has already been changed – so why am I getting email sent to the old address?

I contact their technical support via email and get a rapid response – they don’t see any account with that email address (what?) and that I should call. So I call. Turns out that United says it can take several weeks for an email address change to take effect because they queue up their emails weeks ahead of time.

What kind of operational decision is that? Isn’t email exactly the kind of thing that you’d want to set up moments before? The whole nature of electronic information affords rapid change and instantaneous access, blah blah blah – and yet United is treating it like a direct mail campaign or something, where you’d have to have things at the printers weeks in advance. Very strange.