COLUMN: Time to start lying
It’s time to start lying like a college kid just back from Spring Break. I’m not talking about embellishing, spinning or mere fabricating; I’m talking about deliberate, premeditated Congressional-level, fatter-than-Atkins lies. We all need to just start lying every chance we get when asked to fill out yet another needless form or survey. I hereby grant you permission to go forth and tell whoppers.
No, I don’t mean on tax forms, marriage or drivers’ licenses, but on all those Web sites, supermarket discount things and product warranty cards. What are they going to do? Throw you in jail for getting discount Doritos on false pretenses?
I first caught the vision a couple years ago when we were driving hungry and weird through California looking for supermarkets before camping out for the night. We were lost amidst so many strange market chains; every one of which had a special discount card required as the key to the realm of discount booty. At the end of the rainbow were $4 bottles of Merlot and marked-down sushi.
After taking the high moral ground and passing on the discount goodies the first couple times, it occurred to me that we didn’t even live here and there was no heavenly reason for them to know our address, income, age or number of children so I started making things up. The first time was hard and that ghost of 12 years of Catholic school came calling on me. I felt the piercing stares of the Pope and Mel Gibson on me as I wrote down a slightly fake address. I got over it. By the third or fourth supermarket I wasn’t writing in a recognizable language and my claimed birth date was breaking existing world records.
Some of the more clever forms limit your possible age to 99 and your number of children to 30, but I was sure there is a discrimination case brewing there so I would scratch these out and write in my own numbers. I came back from California invigorated and ready to spread the gospel of lying to “the man.”
The only way we are going to stop junk mail, telemarketing, spam and whatever the next wave of intrusion is (some say retinal scanning, but I’m betting on actual blood and urine samples) is to lie. There is no reason they need all this demographic information other than to try to sell us more products or just sell “us.” That is at the bottom of what they are doing – every alumni association, credit union, pet shop and Internet service provider – they are delivering a menu of people with certain tastes, incomes and age ranges who might want to be hit with another sales pitch. The only way we can stop them is if we all appear to be 99-year-olds with 25 children and annual incomes of less than $3,000.
It’s even more fun on the Internet. There are a lot of forms that you have to fill out to get “free” access to the site or software. I’ve found that these automatic info-bots are even dumber than supermarkets. This is what I put in. First name: d; Last name: d; Address: d street, City: d; State: DE (sorry Delaware, but it is easier to remember this way); ZIP Code: 11111 (only the most sophisticated systems kick this out); and lastly for e-mail address: d@d@d.com. I give you permission to plagiarize this exact lie but you might want to pick a different letter of the alphabet.
I know that, like me, you will find this difficult at first. You will imagine someone looking over your shoulder or perhaps an Internal Revenue Service SWAT team breaking down your front door. It won’t happen. You are making the world a better place in one of the few little acts of rebellion left to us in the post Ashcroft rubble.
Dennis Hinkamp’s column appears every Friday. Comments can be sent to dhinkamp@msn.com.