Issue #40
Last Update August 3, 2005
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National Who Am I by Gert Innsry Through the miracle of modern technology, businesses know more about us than we know about ourselves. The data collected and disseminated by our vendors, insurance companies, government agencies and charities is put together into a composite portrait of our individual likes and dislikes, strengths and frailties, economic status and demographic niche. Always curious as to whether others perceive me as I perceive myself, I decided to see what those seeking my patronage could tell me. I analyzed my junk mail, hoping to find a realistic picture.
Apparently the commercial world sees me as a home-owning, debt-ridden, unemployed, pill-popping transsexual with a perverted taste for incest and bestiality, a need for auto insurance, and OK credit.
A recent survey of junk mails by categories breaks down as follows:
Mortgage rate announcements
Debt Consolidation offers
Credit card offers
Work at Home offers
Cheap medications through the internet (especially Viagra, Prozac and Valium)
Breast enlargement nostrums
Penis enlargement nostrums
Offers of incest videos
Offers of videos of women doing it with various pets and farm animals
Offers to lower my car insurance rates
The spammers are wrong on almost all counts, which proves what my mother always said: be yourself and don't pay attention to what others say about you. Being so thoroughly wrong, how do the vendors sending the spam expect to make any money?
Do they really think men interested in enlarged genitals also want humongous boobs (perhaps to make themselves sexually self-sufficient)? Or, maybe they agree with Freud that women looking to fill a bigger bra suffer at the same time from penis envy (see my monograph in The Journal of the Psychology of Women, Contra Freud, or Tail Envy in 19th Century Vienna). Are they really interested in offering debt-consolidation candidates new lines of credit? Do genuine perverts actually give out their real names?
The hopeful side of all this is that if business can get it so wrong, maybe the government doesn't really know much about me, either.
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