Ken wrote:
>>Then again, the security measures in 1968 and '69 were probably less
stringent than they are now.<<
A couple of years ago, I was standing in the hall in the building where my
office is and I got a call from my wife wanting to know where I was. When I
told her I was standing in the hall talking to whomever I was talking to,
she asked me, "Are you sure?" When I said yes, she asked me again. I said
yes again and offered to let her talk to the person I was talking to. At
this point, she told me that she'd just gotten a call from a doctor--I've
forgotten his name--who told her that her husband had been admitted to the
psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital because he was having a severe
psychotic episode. At first she thought it was a joke, but when he gave her
my birthday and my social security number, while she still did not believe
him that I had been taken to the hospital, she called me to double check.
Once I started calling around, I was convinced someone who had stolen my
identity. Thankfully, as I found out, he was under lock down in a
psychiatric hospital in the Bronx, but I went home and canceled all my
credit cards and other such things nonetheless, just to be sure.
The next day I was on the phone with the director of that hospital and found
out precisely what had happened: A man about my age, with my name, who was
in severe psychotic distress was taken by the police to the hospital near
where I live. The person who admitted him looked through the hospital
records and found the one time that I went to the emergency room there about
five years earlier. That person never bothered to double-check that the guy
in front of him or her really was the Richard Newman on the computer, and so
I was, briefly, almost caught up in what could have been a Kafkaesque
nightmare.
In the end, everything got sorted out pretty quickly and this situation
ended up providing an interesting challenge for the people at my insurance
company because, while I do not remember the precise details, it turns out
that they had not mechanism for purging their systems of patient records in
a case like mine. I also very much enjoyed the letter written by the
hospital's director to the insurance company: lots of "the Richard Newman
who is (or is not) your insured" and "the Richard Newman who is (or is not)
our patient." My friends told me I should make it the beginning of a novel.
Perhaps one day I will.
Richard
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