What's your SSN?

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What's your Social Security number? This question has perhaps caused me the most grief in my life. Most people will provide it, some people will refuse it, ALL people know it's illegal to demand it. And yet the card company uses it to organize accounts. Nothing is as unique an identifier as this number. And though it is becoming more and more common to use the driver's license on applications, this is the easiest to use.

It's not hard.

Being scary is not something to get used to. I might have talked about this before but showing your identification is NOT supposed to pull the IRE out of people.

I recently made mention of how Trayvon Martin might have scared people by wearing his hoodie and that though being afraid of people was ok, it is even more justifiable when you hide your identity.

So recently, William Shatner starts to throw a fuss about some guy that was verified. My guess is that now that he has thrown his weight around and after some guy got his goat about the whole process because he was a relative nobody and too bad for Bill(William) because his famous actor friends were gonna have to wait, now he wants to throw it around some more and try to get twitter to give up their verified policies and lay down some rules besides "you're verified cuz we said so".

But Bill is different, he's from Canada. He doesn't like to have to verify himself and recently he went so far as to try to have his facebook account verified and they would do it only if he provided a driver's license.

Then he refused. 

Why do they always refuse a simple request by authority?

There went some of Bill's popularity, you see BECAUSE you are a big time movie star and get accommodated by SOME businesses doesn't mean all businesses will treat you that way. And more importantly when it comes to TRUTH... everyone demands it, even if they don't care or live near you or even see you but once in a blue moon, they wanna know your secret if they think you have one.

In my job, as a call representative all those years on the phones one of the first things I had to do was verify accounts. What's your this and that and finally just give me the password you gave us. And if they couldn't give the password then it wasn't them. And this is especially difficult for Spanish accounts because most of the time, like my parents, they preferred to have their children speak perfect English rather than harang their way through a representative that may or may not explain themselves well.  And sometimes these children(who me?) would take an elite-ist approach to the whole situation and just PRETEND to be the parents and then... poof, off to the fraud department with you.

And you might think what jerks we are until you come to terms with HOW much fraud is out there. People can pretend to be someone else easily by just copying down information. Someone just fills out an application over and over perhaps with the same SSN several times because we can't just ex out someone's VALID SSN even if it is copied. The fraud department now works with official law enforcement and has quite a few ways to catch criminals but believe me when I say that not many are caught.

In the bar, it's even MORE necessary because serving one minor can close your restaurant. And despite being nice gentle people who love everybody, if you're serving minors, who knows what OTHER secrets you think you can get away with. So law enforcement is very strict with this seemingly innocuous law... ... ... and the people working there will explain it to you happily most especially after you become friends with them.

But if you are on the OUTSIDE, like Bill from Canada, who refuses to show his ID, probably because he doesn't HAVE one, well then... "I'm sorry CAPTAIN, I'm gonna have to send you over to our fraud department."

PS. He was promoting his show this weekend in Las Vegas that I wish I could have attended if only I would have foreseen spending $5000 on something stupid. It's called Shatner's World and, oddly enough, it really DOES seem like he is in his own world sometimes. 

When these odd coincidences happen, like his show title and these things happening online at the same time, I wonder if the GODS are making fun of me... or maybe they are telling me this REALLY IS his world. 

Sometimes, I think I rather look like him... what?