WRITTEN ON February 27th, 2006 BY Richard S AND STORED IN Uncategorized
Last week, I queued behind a woman trying to buy her new rail season ticket: The ticket clerk repeatedly refused to issue any ticket. What was her awful crime? Had she attacked or endangered other passengers? …
No, she was a non threatening “twenty something;” but she’d moved to a new house which still has no official post code!
Apparently she has encountered this problem many times over the last few weeks: eg. Can’t order a telephone; Can’t order utilities; Can’t buy insurance; Can’t order goods or services; Problems with bank accounts; etc. etc.
In desperation, she tried to use the post codes of her ex boyfriend, her parents, a work colleague etc. etc. but none of these allowed her to buy the season ticket.
So much for a “non house:” With ID cards, we’ll very soon start meeting “non persons!”
2 Responses to “ID Cards: An Early Taste?”
I remember trying (and failing) for more than a year to get a credit card in this country, because as a 23-year-old “with no credit history”, I was “a risk”. You’ve guessed it – I had plenty of credit history, just not in the USA. It’s all in the UK. I eventually had to threaten the bank that I would talk to lawyers about their promise not to discriminate on the basis of national origin, before they would consider me.
Coming to an ID card debate near you, aniridia. “You got no biometric, you ain’t a person”.
An interesting one, this!
I know exactly what she is going through and in fact, because it happened to me in 1998, newly arrived from Australia and moving into a large office building that had been converted into apartments (ie, multiple addresses for a former single address postcode) my problems were perhaps an order of magnitude more complex.
That experience did attract me to the concept of an identity card (assuming, of course, I could have obtained one!) as I was a non-person despite having passport correctly stamped, money and so-on. The moral was, I found, to be persistent with whatever organisation you were dealing with, whether government…ot Vodafone!