He may not recognize the face, but that number sure has a familiar ring to it
Bunty Justin of Marina del Rey is trying bravely to cope with the computer age. Even though she always felt at home with her typewriter, she has bought a computer, and is using word-processing software to deal with her correspondence.
“So I make tentative pokes at the unfriendly keys,” she writes, “lock the margins in the wrong places, adjust the tabs so they refuse to work at all, stare blankly at the stern and inflexible orders shining out from the screen, lose all the copy I have been staunchly assured was safely ‘in memory’--sigh a lot--and go out to get the mail. . . .”
It was while going through her mail that Bunty came upon a symbol of the technological revolution that all but smashed her ego. It was a “subscription acknowledgement” from House & Garden magazine and it gave her a “file number” that she was instructed to use in any correspondence with the magazine.
Like all of us, Bunty is used to being identified by numbers. Each of us has a Social Security number that is permanent, exclusive, and definitive. It contains only nine digits, so somehow it must be possible to rearrange nine digits in enough ways that all of us can have our own unduplicated numbers.
Bunty was stunned, then, when she read her file number for House & Garden. Are you ready? Here it is:
300128 JST 3D82M096 6046807023 45 05 1460 00018002.
She could hardly believe it. Somewhere in the computer files of House & Garden that was her personal number. How could Bunty Justin, a perfectly nice woman who lives in Marina del Rey and keeps her house and tends her garden, have given rise to so complicated a number? How could she possibly be classified with such a string of symbols? What did JST mean, for example? And why were there a D and an M in 3D82M096?
“Remember,” she writes, “when a magazine acknowledged your subscription and cheerfully assured you they would be happy to help if the occasion ever rose? That all you would have to do was simply enclose a subscription label for proper identification?
She calls my attention to a postscript from House & Garden that advises her:
“If at any time you have a question about, or problem with, your subscription, let us know by referring to your File Number which is indicated on the enclosed Subscription Acknowledgement Form.”
“To think,” she says, “that I am supposed to remember that number leaves me both speechless and, understandably, out of marking ink. It is there, right in front of me, but I still don’t believe it.
“And I’m not going to try any longer. I am going to put a bottle of Vouvray on ice, unplug all this machinery which sits, staring accusingly at me, and lose myself in pleasant (if not downright smashed) dreams of the Good Ole Days. . . .”
I don’t blame Bunty for wanting to get smashed. How unnerving it must be for her, a circumspect woman, to sit in her house, trying to pay her bills, and to contemplate the fact that back in Boulder, Colo., where House & Garden evidently does its bookkeeping, that seemingly pleasant, unobtrusive little magazine knows so much about her that it requires 43 digits just to identify her.
Where can it end? If House & Garden knows that much about her, and they sell their information, say, to Vanity Fair, which adds what they know about her, and Vanity Fair sells her file to People magazine--her number will sooner or later become astronomical in length, and it will have to be represented in some shortcut way, as astronomical distance is measured in light years.
How much does a magazine have to know about us to carry on the simple business of selling us a subscription and collecting for delivery?
I subscribe to a couple of special-interest magazines that can’t have very large subscriptions--one being Free Inquiry and the other The Skeptical Inquirer--and yet my number at Free Inquiry is A022223-8603-051, and my number at The Skeptical Inquirer is A-009574-8703-087. Those are fairly modest numbers compared with Bunty Justin’s House & Gardens number, but even so I doubt if they have to use that many digits to distinguish me from their other subscribers.
No magazine has anywhere near the number of subscribers that the various telephone companies have. There must be about 100 million telephones in this country. And yet any one of us can call any other one of us by dialing only 11 digits (including the prefix 1).
What do all those other numbers and letters mean? Do they include your military record, your marital status, the number of your children, your police record (if any), your religion (if any) and the way you vote?
I hate to think that The Skeptical Inquirer knows that much about me, though of course they know I’m skeptical or I wouldn’t subscribe to their magazine.
My wife was shocked at the length of Bunty’s number until I checked a recent issue of Sunset magazine, to which she has subscribed for years, and found out that her number is 3000004 SIT 4251R095 G444 OCT86 M172OPO744 D12.
Now she’s wondering if it’s worth having someone know that much about her just for a few tips on planting bulbs and where to find a good bed-and-breakfast place in San Luis Obispo.
Why can’t they just use our Social Security numbers?
I may join Bunty Justin in that bottle of Vouvray.
