If there’s anything I hate more than being demanded to part with my Social Security Number for numerous things that don’t really need it, it’s the tendency of late for the asker to lazily shorten it to “your social.”  That makes it sound so much more innocuous and “friendly.”  After all, who doesn’t want to be “social”?  It makes you seem unreasonable for getting offended by such a request. 

I just ran into this because Cingular’s obnoxious computer system had mangled my address yet again, substituting “Court” for “Street”.  Luckily, the Court is connected to my Street and serviced by the same postman.  This means that he actually knows my name and delivers it to me.  If it’d been a weekend, the substitute carrier would have likely left my bill at the corresponding address down the way.

After navigating Cingular’s designed-to-make-you-give-up-and-go-away VRU and escaping through hitting zero (even though ‘0’ wasn’t a listed option, it took it), I was eventually transferred to someone who demanded my cell number again and “the last 4 digits of your social.”  It turns out that it’s their policy to either ask for your birthday or the last four digits of your SSN.  I had her put my birthday in the system.  However, it occurred to me that I don’t recall giving them my SSN.  I originally started with them before they changed their name to a silly made-up word, so it’s likely that I didn’t care as much about privacy at the time.

Anyhow, given my previous dealings with Cingular’s online systems, I’m not sanguine that my address will actually get changed.  When I moved I had a hard time getting it to take my address, since it wanted to shoehorn my address into a set of fields, such that I entered the house number in one field, the street name in another, and then selected the type (Street, Drive, etc) from a drop-down.  Given that my correct address requires an additional directional modifier, their system was obviously not designed with me in mind.  As an example, my address would be written as “### Name Street South”, which I had to enter without the “South”.  Fortunately, the north part of my street doesn’t have a house with the same number as mine.  Somewhere along the way, though, the system morphed that into “### Name Court”. 

Given that this type of confusion resulted in having my gas disconnected without warning, you can understand that I’m likely to be a bit peeved with systems that change my address for no apparent reason.

I think part of it is that companies often “normalize” addresses and for some reason their normalization routine changes it if the original isn’t correctly entered.  I know the postal system wants it to be written “### Name St S” or it won’t recognize it.  I always enter it that way on forms, but people have a habit of entering them wrong or changing parts of it.  About a month ago I had the same thing happen with my truck loan.