I remember when it was possible to move to another part of the country and rebuild your life. Except for high-level jobs, no one did background investigations. You could owe money to every utility company in operation at your former home, and still be able to get utilities in your own name in a new place. In fact, it wasn't even necessary to show identification to get utility service. Now, everything follows you from place to place, seemingly arriving ahead of you.
It's true Ken, the way it was when we grew up is long gone. Can't say I wasn't warned. There really is no such thing as a clean slate anymore. I shudder to think what people do when they are a victim of something like stolen identity. It has to be the worst nightmare, one that no matter what you do you can't escape. Everything these days is computerized, even your medical records, there really is no such thing as privacy. I know they will tell you it is for your own good, but I certainly wonder about that too. When I was young I believed all those stories I was told, about how you could be anything you want, you just have to want it bad enough. I know thats not true and I have no expectation that it ever will be. Sometimes it really is just a toss of the dice. I was talking to a friend today, a CPA that seemed to have it all going right, a year ago today he was talking about retirement and all his plans, he found out a few months ago he had a brain tumor, today on the phone you could hear how hard it was for him to even formulate a sentence. I wonder what will happen to him now? I think a lot about moving, I also think about retirement. My problem is I allowed myself to get attached to this home. I had a plan and I thought I was good. maybe not, so I made a new plan. I can't imagine moving again and starting yet again, and still someday I think it would be great. Just pull up roots and leave it behind because truth be told it wasn't all that happy here anyway....
I have a very very common name Patricia Ann Brown Matthews Baker, there are so many people with some form of that name it is hard to go into a place and not be told I have already been there. I have received another persons medical records, same name, same birthday, same city, same doctor, it was the weight on the chart that caught my eye to know it was not me, I didn't see the error until I saw the weight. Things have changed, I have to often prove that I have never been to some places because of the name is so common.
If you change countries, pretty much nothing follows you, and you are stuck starting over... Drove me crazy when I first moved to the US, it was almost impossible to get credit. The credit card companies and the banks refused to look at many years of perfect credit in Canada. The only company that was willing to help out was American Express. When I told them I was moving to the US, they contacted Amex in the US and got a new card set up for me. Of course within a year, I was getting thousands of credit card offers in the mail and wanted to go back to being anonymous!
When I moved from California to Texas in 1983, I had nearly forty thousand dollars in severance pay, plus quite a lot of money that I had saved, since I was earning good money and didn't have a lot of vices to eat it up, with a balance of more than forty thousand. My intention was to withdraw that money from my bank, Wells Fargo, and find another bank to deposit it in once I arrived in Texas. They talked me out of that, saying that they could wire it to their Wells Fargo branch in Brownsville, Texas, and it would be there when I got there. So I just took a few hundred in cash to get me there. , Arriving in Brownsville, I found the Wells Fargo branch, at the address where it was supposed to be, only they told me that it wasn't a bank, but an investment group of some sort, and that they didn't know anything about a wire transfer. I called my old bank in California, and they told me that I no longer had an account there because it had been closed. No one at either location appeared to have the least bit of interest in figuring out what had happened. So here I was in Brownsville, Texas, where I had a job but didn't know anyone. Everything I owned was in a rental truck, and I had nowhere to live, or enough money to afford more than a few nights in a hotel; and it was Friday. I introduced myself at the new job, which I was due to start on Monday. The plant manager offered me the company's guest house for as long as I needed it, which took some of the pressure off, except that I had really wanted a place where I could move my stuff into, and get rid of that very large moving truck. Fortunately, Duro Bag Company was a large employer in Brownsville, and I was able to find a place in a condominium, where they would actually let me move into without anything down. I'm sure my employer guaranteed them payment, because they weren't at all concerned about that. It was nearly three weeks, and dozens of telephone calls, before my money arrived. Because the Brownsville Wells Fargo was not a bank, and they had no bank branches in the area, it was re-routed to another bank in Brownsville, which they apparently chose at random. That was a frustrating experience, with one bank simply telling me that my account with them had been closed, and the other insisting that they weren't even a bank, and that they knew nothing of a wire transfer.
Thank God you worked with some people who were willing to help out... The bank obviously wasn't going to... Amazing...