Did anyone read this story. It's a little scary to know that if a computer glitch says your dead, then, by God, you're dead
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2010/08/hey-banks-this-woman-is-alive.html?GT1=43001
Judy Rivers of Jasper AL is DEAD!! This bit of information came as quite the shock to Ms. Rivers when she went to her local bank to open a safety deposit box. Ms. Rivers has suffered a "digital death" at the hands of Chex Systems.
Chex Systems, which is a subsidiary of Florida-based Fidelity National Information Services Inc., said in an e-mail to msnbc.com that it could not comment on a specific consumer's situation, citing privacy concerns, but it asserted that all death information comes "via a direct feed from the Social Security Administration."
Two years ago, an msnbc.com investigation found that the Social Security Administration database is riddled with similar errors. A government report found that more than 1,000 people were being "killed" incorrectly every month. In some cases, appealing the decisions can take more than a year to complete.
This story will upset and enlighten you about the number of errors that go unnoticed in our digital world, many of which can cause you extreme hardship and, as is evidenced in this story, your actual DEATH!!
I read this story and was immediately reminded of a similar situation that occured in my family back in the early 70's. My father, a career military man, (USAF) had been re-assigned to Japan. As a result of that re-assignment all of his dependents needed to acquire the necessary innoculations, documentation, etc., which documentation included new passports for most of us so that we could accompany him to his assigned duty station. The dependents included my mother and 5 children. At this time we children ranged in ages from 4 to 12 years. We were all born while my father was on active duty, we were all born either in military hospitals (my sister having been born in England) or in private hospitals located near military bases and the government paid for our delivery and our mother's stay in the hospital as well as all of our medical care from day one. How, you may wonder, does this have a thing to do with the story referred to? Well...... when we presented ourselves to the appropriate office, with orders in hand, to acquire our passports, we were told that my father had only ONE dependent, his wife. There was no record at our current duty station to reflect that he had 5 children.
This was of course long before the time when you were reduced to simply being a number in a data base and records were paper not digital, but, I remember being taken by my father along with my siblings to the JAG office, being presented to the Commander of the post and my father obtaining the necessary "proof" that we were in fact his dependents. Can you imagine the headache at the time for my poor parents, but, can you imagine the trouble that would create had this been in today's world when a simple data entry mistake can KILL YOU or in the alternative indicate that you were never BORN.
Ms. Rivers is on her way to getting her life back in order and having herself declared a living breathing soul. This is the suggestion from the article as to how to prove you are in fact a living breathing soul:
Because Rivers' error has not reached the Social Security Administration — and her records there appear to be accurate — Foley believes her problem will be relatively easy to fix. The recipe:
"Get a letter from the Social Security Administration verifying you are alive and a letter from local police verifying your driver's license and send it in," he said. "The fix should find its way through the system relatively quickly."
That's assuming Chex Systems declares Rivers alive and kicking some time soon. For now, she remains in the middle of her digital murder mystery. And she may never know who, or what, wanted her dead in the first place.
Diversification. Hm.... is it working for Fidelity National. Kinda makes you wonder.