Uncle's Rant

Friday, July 14, 2006

Do you have a moment to complete this survey?


So tonight I'm at home in my front garden minding my own business and spraying some ants with ant powder when a girl comes running over. Now the road we live in is a little strange in that we've lived here 5 years and we only know a couple of neighbours, the rest would rather not even say hello. So this girl came over from a house just over the road and she approached me in such a manner that I thought she was going to tell me off for murdering the ants but this wasn't the case at all. She explained that some guy had just knocked on her door and had tried to enter her house, she'd pushed him back out but in the process had now locked herself out. Worse still the guy was still hanging around down the road and she was clearly upset by the whole thing. She pointed the guy out to me and I said I'd go and confront him.

Making my way down the street I noticed he was leaning rather forcibly against a car with a woman inside, as I approached he saw me coming and backed away at which point the lady got out of the car, locked it and walked away quickly.
He was a shady looking character with a clipboard, probably middle-aged and a little creepy looking.
I asked him what he was doing and he showed me his I.D. and explained he was doing a survey on transportation. Now as it turned out he seemed to check out ok and his problem was really in the manner with which he conducted himself. For example when I asked him what he was doing he immediately responded with "I'm looking for girls aged between 16 and 35", now what the hell kind of question is that to break the ice with.

Now pushing him to one side I'll get to the point of this rant. We're all told when we open the door to a stranger we must check their ID, right? Well how on earth are we supposed to know what a real ID is and what a fake one looks like? This guys ID stated he was working for Virgin Transportation, but like so many IDs it looked kind of like he'd just printed it out on hit state-of-the-art "dot matrix" printer circa 1989 and then got it laminated before finally sticking the cherry on top by ramming a safety pin through it.

With all this fraud and danger around the public need a new way of ID-ing strangers. With the wireless home just around the corner surely they could soon be given something we could scan to check with a central database.

Next time somebody comes knocking on my door I'm going to open it with a video camera rolling. If they don't mind me filming them, and signing a release form so I can show it the world over, heck I'll talk to them about anything!

Results here, if it ever happens.

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