{"id":438,"date":"2018-06-30T20:41:34","date_gmt":"2018-07-01T01:41:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/?p=438"},"modified":"2018-06-30T20:52:56","modified_gmt":"2018-07-01T01:52:56","slug":"i-just-wanted-a-pizza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/2018\/06\/30\/i-just-wanted-a-pizza\/","title":{"rendered":"I just wanted a pizza"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Is it really that hard to just sell me something?\u00a0 If I want to go to a concert, when I go to buy tickets I have to create an account where I hand over personal information.\u00a0 Everybody on the internet wants you to create an account anymore.\u00a0 It’s become disconcerting.\u00a0 Remember Radio Shack?\u00a0 They would ask for your phone number at every purchase.\u00a0 You’d have thought that that diode you purchased had national security implications.<\/p>\n

Yesterday was Friday.\u00a0 It was hot and muggy.\u00a0 I was tired.\u00a0 On the way home I decide I’m going to stop in and get a pizza to take home for dinner.\u00a0 I go in, the clerk immediately asks for my phone number.\u00a0 Curious, I ask the clerk if it’s required.\u00a0 He looks shocked, then says ‘yes’.\u00a0 Now, I have no idea if he’s lying or telling the truth.\u00a0 He could have lied just to get me to shut up and comply.\u00a0 It’s a good thing The Grump has a strategy for this.\u00a0 If The Grump, aka “Jenny”, determines that they have no legitimate need for my actual phone number… such as when purchasing a pizza… he gives his phone number as 867-5309.\u00a0 I’ve been doing this for over 20 years now, and only once has someone looked back at me and smiled because they knew exactly what I was doing.\u00a0 (Then there was the business that had over a dozen ‘Jennys’, and I had choose from the list.)\u00a0 This does afford me some level of privacy, granted, but it still shouldn’t have to be that way.\u00a0 I order the pizza, I give you my money, you give me my pizza.\u00a0 Done.<\/p>\n

But it’s amazing how many people just blindly hand over their personal information, as if everyone is ethical and honest.\u00a0 It wasn’t all that long ago that the same thing happened routinely with Social Security numbers.\u00a0 Now, THAT’s dangerous.<\/p>\n

Of course The Grump is not so naive as to not know they are collecting information to make more money, to entice me to buy things I might not otherwise buy, to sell and\/or use against me at a later date.\u00a0 They claim it’s to serve me better, and there is a kernel of truth to that, but if they didn’t get anything extra out of it they wouldn’t be concerned about serving me better at all.<\/p>\n

The Grump wrote a letter to corporate asking if this was indeed a mandatory policy.\u00a0 I want to know if the clerk was being truthful or if he was jerkin’ my chain.\u00a0 Simple transactions shouldn’t have to be so difficult.<\/p>\n

I just wanted a pizza.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is it really that hard to just sell me something?\u00a0 If I want to go to a concert, when I go to buy tickets I have to create an account where I hand over personal information.\u00a0 Everybody on the internet wants you to create an account anymore.\u00a0 It’s become disconcerting.\u00a0 Remember Radio Shack?\u00a0 They would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annoyances"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":446,"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438\/revisions\/446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}