Identity

Someone stole my wife’s bank card this weekend. By the time we found out, they’d already run up a bunch of charges against our checking account. I cancelled the card last night, and just for good measure, cancelled our credit card too, just in case they’d gotten access to her purse and copied down the number. As of this morning, the damage seems limited to what we discovered last night. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

I am, as a rule, completely paranoid about stuff like this. I’m loathe to give out my telephone number or even my zipcode when cashiers ask for it, I rail against restaurants who still display full credit card info on their receipts, I guard my social security number as if it was soul. And, really, in a way, it is. Our material identity is tied up in, and defined by, the various means of identification that we carry around with us. The dystopian future where human beings are reduced to nothing more than serial numbers is already here: the barcodes just haven’t been tatooed on our flesh yet.

So as of last night, I’m even more paranoid. Even so, I realize that there’s only so much that I can do. There are at least five companies I can think of, off the top of my head, that have my social security number in their databases right now, and that doesn’t even include government agencies. And for all these companies’ assurances that they will never reveal it to anyone, under any circumstances, it’s quite likely that, one way or another, my personal info will be — or already has ben — exposed to the world; and, after that happens, it’s really just the luck of the draw. Some identity harvester might stumble across my numerical self and start defrauding large companies in my name, or signing up for NRA “Guns Are Fun!” correspondence courses, or donating large sums of my money to the Bush campaign. Stuff like that’s happening right now, everywhere. It’s madness.

But whatever. Assuming we did manage to head off the worst of it [frantically searching for wood to knock on, not finding any, rapping forehead instead and hoping the Fates have a sense of humor], then the damage wasn’t too bad, this time. Whoever got our card hightailed it up to Baltimore and somehow managed to spend a couple hundred dollars at a 7-11 (I wonder if the cashier got at all suspicous when a guy named Sandy walked up to the counter with fifty slurpies in his arms and ordered a hundred Big Bites), then went to Wal-Mart, and then to Popeye’s, where he bought what must have been several drum-sized buckets of chicken wings. That’s it so far.

So on the one hand, I’m guardedly relieved. On the other, I feel besmirched, violated, broken-into, and distinctly insecure. A small plastic card-shaped piece of us is out there in the world, in someone else’s hands. It’s freaky, man.