Tag Archives: identification

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The first taste of spring. I’ve paid my dues and part of my reward has been “graduating” to a cube next to the windows. Usually that’s a good thing. Except this time of year when the weather finally starts shaking off the winter doldrums, things start greening up, and our courtyard looking more like an ill-tended park than a well-tended prison yard. It’s good to have a view of something, but once the rain stopped this week and the sun came out the view has mostly left me with a feeling that I’d much rather be outside working in the yard (or holding down a stool on one of my favorite deck bars) than sitting here working on version 43 of The PowerPoint Presentation that Will Save the World.

2. Being common. Pretty much everyone I know professionally carries around something called a Common Access Card. The theory behind the CAC is that it would be the one ID card to rule them all. It’s a good idea. Except that it’s not. Although it is ubiquitously common, it provides access to basically nothing. One way you know this is by standing behind a woman at the front door card scanner and watching for almost a minute while she tries to use it to unlock the doors. Even offering up a helpful, “Uh, I think you need to use you other access card for that door” was met with a furious gaze and a firm “No. You have to use your CAC.” Yeah. Fine lady. Don’t mind me while I reach past you to swipe my card so I can actually get to my desk.

3. The yard. One of the reasons I liked the new house so much was that the yard took up a relatively minor space on an otherwise spacious lot. The rest is filled in with reasonably large trees and plenty of undergrowth. The house needs a few odds and ends, but I made my peace with living with it for a while to decide what and how to attack those. The yard on the other hand is probably only a few days – a week at most – from demanding immediate attention. Trimming shrubs, weeding front and back, new mulch, dirt patches to seed where gas and septic have been dug up, areas where grading pushes water towards the house instead of away from it, the eventual fence project, and the general mowing and edging. Assuming the yard stays dry some of those things are going to have to start this weekend with others following on shortly thereafter. I haven’t had the amount of time to plan the attack that I’d have liked. By the end of summer I’ll have it sorted out, but don’t expect progress to be coherent or consistent in any way. Sadly that means it’s going to take more time than expected to bring the outside up to my probably unreasonable standard of “finished.”

ID(on’t)…

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At any given time, I’m carrying around three or four separate pieces of plastic that confirm that I’m really me – The card that gets me inside the fence, the card that gets me inside the building, an ID from three jobs ago that for some reason is still stuck in the back of my card holder, and my venerable old school driver’s license. It seems to me that it should be possible to take the information on all of those cards, link it into one master database, and then figure out how to issue me one card to rule them all.

Better yet, just let me keep all my pertinent information on my phone. Lord knows I’m not going to leave the house without that. It just seems that there should be better technology available than a metal chip sandwiched between two layers of plastic. Maybe the answer is biometrics – a thumb print and a retina scan to prove we are who we say we are and that we’re where we’re supposed to be. It just seems that in the last 100 years we should have made more progress than simply transferring information from a laminated paper card to a laminated plastic one.

Oh, and managing to make it something I’m not chronically prone to leave laying on the kitchen table when I’m on my way out the door well before the break of dawn would be pretty damned helpful too. Feel free to just jam a chip in the back of my head and get it over with. Sure it’s intrusive and has all sorts of negative privacy implications, but it would prevent needing to drive all the way back home to pick up my ID and that’s really the only thing I’m looking for at this point.

Newfangled technology…

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After extensive deliberation, some would even say argument, with the Tennessee Department of Safety Driver’s License facility, I learned this morning that for purposes of residence verification, electronic bank statements do not meet the official definition of “bank statements.” Just as a point of clarification, it’s not as though I put my statement on a CD and took it to them. I printed the statement to show that I was, in fact, domiciled in the state. Apparently once it is actually printed out, my e-statement became defined as a “photocopy.” Who knew?

The whole idea behind getting electronic statements is so that you only need to print them when and if they are needed. It saves me filing space, it saves the bank postage, and even the environment wins, right? Looking at the fine examples of state employees running the desk at the facility, I didn’t particularly feel like getting into an argument over the finer points of what, by definition, constitutes a bank statement. It wasn’t a crowd that look to be up for a debate of the finer points of… well… anything, really. Sometimes you just need to know when you’ve made a bad investment and cut your losses. Today, the better part of valor was to roll my eyes, sigh heavily, and walk away muttering something about being surrounded by idiots.

This is 2007, folks. We landed a damned man on the moon almost forty years ago. We’ve had home computers for 25 years. Email has been around for about 15. I’ve been getting electronic statements for virtually everything for at least five years. Can someone tell me why I can’t just walk up to some kind of biometric scanner, swipe my USA Identacard, scan my eyball, and have my information validated? It boggles my mind that we still insist on making these transactions on paper. Completely inefficient and bloody inconvenient. We’ll never have to worry about the Brave New World because the bleeding government will never figure out how to use the machines properly in the first place.

Bloody Hell. I really am surrounded by idiots… Present company excepted, of course.