The caller wants my number
I am lucky to live in Canada. One simple reason. All those people that phone me with ways to try and get to my money know so little about us as a nation. Today a call to let me know that my social insurance number had been compromised. I’m not sure what that would mean since all it allows me to do is pay taxes but anyhow, I asked the person on the line to please repeat the message for me in the other official language. A very quick way to get a dial tone. You know, should I want to call someone else to let them know the bad news. Or good news. I’ve been handing out my social insurance number for most of my life. It used to be the way that we got through the meal checkpoint at university. No number no food. And despite all the efforts to have been made to get my information not one caller has ever offered to pay my taxes. It really does not matter. I know that if my number was truly compromised that I would not get an anonymous caller from the government to let me know that. They have much more direct manner for dealing with people. It would be a shock though. To go online to pay my taxes and find that there was no longer any need to do so because I was no longer me. As my kids might say, sweet. Seriously though I wonder if the people who put together these scripts ever actually test them or is this some kind of fever dream that comes to them after a long night with beer. At one point we took the time to destroy a lot of old documents. For the main part pay slips. All of them containing my secret number. More secret than that and you get a big fat prize I guess. For those that want to know the real story you can actually test the validity of one of these numbers. Too complicated to detail here but I did it as an exercise many years ago. One of these add these digits to these digits minus these digits and see if you get a number at the end that looks like the last digit of your number. Like a magic trick for those that do not understand magic. So I will go back to waiting for more phone calls. Probably from Amazon which seems to have sold me a lot of old iPhones. Still waiting for delivery.
