Who's That Girl?

I recently received a letter from a law firm that a credit card company “misplaced” a box containing computer back-up tapes that contained pretty much my financial life story. Like any good company that screws their customers royally, a risk mitigation strategy went into effect to safeguard my identity. Included in this strategy is a free subscription to Triple Alert, a service that will alert me if anything fishy pops up on my credit report. Haunted by the thought of working in a restaurant wearing a pirate costume and singing to tourists in T-shirts, I decided it was wise to sign up for this service and monitor for security breaches or other potential credit issues, just in case. Much to my surprise, I discovered there was something fishy on my credit report.

Risking sounding like a braggart, I have excellent credit (the credit report said so!) with nearly 15 years of picture perfect activity. No overdue accounts, no collections, high credit indicating good financial experience, and my student loans are paid in full. Our fairly new mortgage leaves a rather high balance, and I still have some time left to pay off the Jeep, but those loans be taken care of in due time. Credit-wise there were no real surprises on the report except a credit card for the Limited evidently not cancelled and inactive since January 2002. It was my personal information that included something surprising, a section titled “also known as.”

Apparently I have an alias unknown to me until today. Not the 9 instances of my misspelled name, but a name totally different than my own. Somehow the credit companies think I also carry around the moniker Michelle “my husband’s last name.” For those who don’t know me, or haven’t caught up with my blog postings to go wayyyyyy back to 2005, my husband opted to keep his maiden name and so did I. This is one issue I am incredibly opinionated on; I even contribute to the Lucy Stone League, an organization campaigning to change the widespread practices of wives taking husbands' surnames at marriage and of children being given fathers' surnames. Yet for some reason, nearly 7 years after saying I do, people still require a reminder that my husband and I carry different surnames.

Names are an important key to what a society values. Anthropologists recognize naming as 'one of the chief methods for imposing order on perception.
- David S. Slawson

Apparently I needed to inform the credit agencies of this decision as well, because all the major agencies had me with an alias of Michelle “My husband’s last name.” There has never been a single official document with my last name as anything other then the one I was born with, yet on my credit report there was this completely different name. The 9 different spellings, although annoying, are to be expected with a last name of multiple syllables, but a totally different last name? I felt like I was stealing someone else’s identity as I read the report and couldn’t for the life of me figure out how this mistaken identity happened. My husband and I are both on our mortgage with our own names, and share a credit card account set up with each of our names. These are the only documents I could see triggering this presumptuous change to my list of names. Presumptuous not only that I took on his name, but that we were even married.

As annoying and time consuming as this was, it was probably far less work then any hassle people who change their names experience. It took about a half-dozen phone calls, but I got this other woman’s name expunged from my credit history (and cancelled the Limited credit card). I reprinted the reports and now feel like I’m back to my old self.

It's a small world after all

Sorry if the title of this gets the ageless Disney theme park ride song stuck in your head, but when the world seems so large and overwhelming something happens proving just how small our planet really is. The internet connects us with friends near and far, making it possible to maintain relationships over expansive distances easier than days past. We can “meet” people with similar hobbies, shared interests, fascinating experiences, and touching stories. People from our pasts come out of the woodwork, sparking old memories and often reigniting friendships. Families discover long lost cousins through genealogy sites and software, completing sections of the family tree puzzle. All these links across humanity help break down the manmade concepts of countries and nations, connecting people who in the past would likely be enemies rather than friends. Social networking might just bring more peace, tolerance and understanding to the world then any visit by Jimmy Carter. At times the small world can be rather creepy with cyber-stalking, pasts that should remain hidden, or when worlds collide, connecting people from very different parts of your own past.

I am a facebook geek, and love the “people you may know” feature that suggests, as you might have guessed from the title, people you may know because you have mutual friends or shared an alma mater with. More often than not I actually do know the person suggested, and when I don’t know the person it is usually because we only have one mutual friend, a silly way to connect two people since we all possess friends and colleagues whose circles never cross. The likelihood of knowing a person increases dramatically with each mutual connection. It is very unlikely to share ten friends and somehow not know each other, although facebook does think I should know half the Classes of 1997 and 1998 from St. Olaf, the alma mater of my husband and many friends, and a bunch of 15 year olds from my cousin’s extensive high school network of 600. After weeding through these obvious mismatches it is fun to find long lost friends and classmates.

Sometimes the mismatch is not so obvious and this is when the world is so small it’s creepy. On four separate occasions in the past month, a completely unfamiliar name and face popped up on my screen and our connection was surprising and strange. I did not know these four people, but each one of them shared some completely random mutual friends. One of the women from Boston was friends with an old roommate when I lived/worked in Delaware and a classmate of mine from grammar school in New York. Another guy from California and I shared two friends, one who I knew from college in Virginia and the other is the daughter of my father’s best friend from the Bronx. Then there is a woman from India who is friends with one of my college classmates and a guy I worked with in New Jersey. Sharing friends with people from completely different walks of life, common connections that would never be revealed anywhere but on networking sites, is mind-blowing. There are over 6 billion people on this planet, the chances of having two people you know from “different worlds” should be statistically small but somehow it happens; a reminder that there’s so much that we share in only one small, small world.

Quote of the Week

My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy!
- Thomas Jefferson