elainegrey

As the NYT article implies, pharmacies are now using ability to reel off one's phone number—or at Walgreen's at least, key in the last 4 digits—as confirmation of identity when picking up a prescription. They now have a note in my file to ask me my address instead, after I kept refusing to go through my purse and read it off the tiny card in there, but the savvy clerks reach over and themselves go through the multi-step process to tell their computer to stop demanding it or some other way to contact me. It's clearly connected to the insurance, but it's so stupid. They actually have my number in their system, of course (I had to cancel calls from them several times before they got that message.) The library thing is connected to San Jose State going back on its agreement with the public library. The catalogues are now separated, SJSU books are no longer listed with LinkPlus, and we all had to get a separate user ID and password. (I'm not sure whether you had already moved, but there was a nasty transition during which they assigned temporary IDs and automatically generated passwords without telling us what they were and one single person wound up answering the phone calls from panicked Public Library users who needed to renew books; SJSU also now only lets you pay fines by credit card. We then all had to come in to create our new permanent IDs and passwords.) This summer they put in a new self-checkout machine in the lobby and demanded the last four digits of my phone number for me to use it. That would make three passwords for their half of the library; the temporary ID and password are still in the system, I see them come up dotted out as options whenever I log in. And I can't remember my phone number and should not be required to produce it as an identifier! Particularly since the way the lady kept saying "But you must have given your phone number when you registered with SJPL", they are clearly thinking of smartphones, and you folks who use those have most of your lives on those things. (Actually I think I gave my e-mail but not the phone number; dealing with SJSU students all the time may have caused them to forget some of us e-mail from PCs.) So I ranted at them and abandoned a stack of books. When we were last there I was afraid I was about to lose my last connection to any sort of scholarly library, but they let me check out the books over the counter as usual (same stack, reconstructed, except for the one that had presumably been misshelved). Maybe San Jose grew a backbone. Or maybe the machine broke.