Back in 2007, when we got satellite TV service from the Dish Network, they didn't want to sell it to us because they couldn't establish our existence to their satisfaction. First they wanted us to have a credit card, which we didn't. Then they said that, if we paid for our "free" installation up front, they would credit our monthly bills for a year until we had been reimbursed, but first they had to run a credit check on us. After not hearing from them for awhile, I asked the local installer, who was a contractor, not an employee, to check into it. He told me that, according to the Dish people, we didn't exist because their credit check came up "negative", which means that they couldn't find any credit records for us. It had been about five years since we had paid off the mortgage on our house, and we hadn't borrowed any money since then. One would think that credit records are kept for at least five years, but apparently not.
After the installer personally vouched for our existence and good character, the Dish people said that, before they would let him install the system for us, I needed to send them a copy of my driver's license and my Social Security card. I sent the driver's license, but I couldn't find my Social Security card, so I sent them a copy of my hypothetical wife's Social Security card, figuring we could just put the service in her name. After not hearing from them for some time, the installer called them again. This time they said the problem was that the names on the driver's license and the S.S. card were not the same, so I sent them a copy of my hypothetical wife's driver's license.
After not hearing from them for some time, the installer recommended that I contact the Dish people myself and see if I had any better luck with them. He said I should send them a letter or an email because, whenever he called them, he got a different person each time, and nobody over there seemed to know what anybody else was doing. I wrote them a nice email explaining the whole thing, and then I said, "If you are a computer, please give this message to a human. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing but respect for computers, but you only know what some human has told you, and they might have given you false or incomplete information." We got our satellite dish within a week after that, but he whole process took several months to unfold.
Another time, back in the 1980s, this lady and I were sent on a business trip to Phoenix, Arizona. Somebody had told us that no car rental company would rent us a car unless we had a credit card, which neither of us did. There was a different lady in the Clerical Department who arranged the trip for us, and I asked her about the credit card thing. She said that she would set it up with the rental company and there would be no problem. When got to the Phoenix airport, there was indeed a problem, so we phoned the paper mill long distance, reversing the charges, and got ahold of our team manager. She told us to give the phone to the car rental person, which we did. After a brief conversation, they gave us the car without further argument. When we got back from our trip, I asked our manager what she had said that had changed their mind. She replied, "I told them to rent you the car and send the bill to Procter & Gamble." That's exactly what we had told them, and the trip arranging lady was supposed to have told them. Okay, this was somebody in management, but the rental people couldn't have known that for sure, she hadn't given them a code or anything like that.
I saw on the TV news this evening that they have a suspect in custody for those New York bombings. He is a naturalized citizen who was born in Afghanistan. So far they have not linked him with ISIS or any other terrorist organization, although they said that he might have been "inspired" by one or more of them. Apparently there are terrorist wannabes or copycats out there who want to do stuff like this without the necessity of paying dues or going to meetings.
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