{"id":266,"date":"2005-07-11T21:58:12","date_gmt":"2005-07-12T02:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/?p=266"},"modified":"2005-07-11T21:58:12","modified_gmt":"2005-07-12T02:58:12","slug":"fraught-phrase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/2005\/07\/fraught-phrase\/","title":{"rendered":"Fraught phrase"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s amazing how, when strung together, ten words that are innocuous on their own can form such a terrifying phrase.  No, not that one; <acronym title=\"I promise I won't come in your mouth\">that one<\/acronym> is only eight (and mind out of the gutter, you!).  The phrase I&#8217;m talking about is a classic that is probably as old as human civilization: I&#8217;m from the government and I&#8217;m here to help you.<\/p>\n<p>About two weeks ago we got a letter from the Department of Health and Human Services addressed to &#8220;Resident&#8221; and given the problems we&#8217;ve been having in DC with elevated lead levels in drinking water I opened it.  According to the enclosed form letter our address was &#8220;randomly selected&#8221; for participation in a <a href=\"http:\/\/nsduhweb.rti.org\">rolling survey<\/a> done by RTI for HHS asking about <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>tobacco, alcohol, and drug use or non-use<\/li>\n<li>knowledge and attitudes about drugs<\/li>\n<li>mental health, and<\/li>\n<li>other health issues<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>An interviewer would be around, the letter said, in about a week to determine if anyone in the household qualified for the survey and, if so, back a week after that to administer the questions which would only take an hour and for which each participant would be paid $30 in cash.  Participation was strictly voluntary and any survey answers would be kept strictly confidential as the interviewer would never ask a participant&#8217;s name.  <\/p>\n<p>I was, unfortunately, not the person who answered the door when the interviewer came around to do the initial assessment.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, you heard that correctly: The Girlfriend volunteered us, not just herself but us, for an &#8220;anonymous&#8221; government sponsored survey about illegal activities and mental status.<\/p>\n<p>The survey questions themselves were about what you&#8217;d expect from a government survey on illegal drug use: what have you taken ever in these given categories, in the past year from today, in the last 30 days?  How often have you missed work because of fill-in-the-blank use? How often have you suffered from fill-in-the-blank with condition currently advertised by BigPharma as easily curable? And on, and on, and on.<\/p>\n<p>So I answered the questions and got my $30 in cash and then came the catch: the follow-up assessment form.  Mostly this form is a check on the interviewer to make sure that the person is, in fact, giving out the money and not keeping it for herself, but this form wants my phone number and my address.<\/p>\n<p>It also has my interview number on it.<\/p>\n<p>I asked the interviewer, pray tell, how I was to be assured that my answers would stay confidential if my case number was associated with my phone number which is linked to my name and address as a matter of public record.  I got a standard response about this just being a quality check.  <\/p>\n<p>Later, when I asked The Girlfriend, who is more than passing bright, the same question she said &#8220;Why would they bother to do that?&#8221;  <\/p>\n<p>Perhaps I&#8217;m paranoid but in this day and age, where a government agency as been specifically forbidden by Congress from collecting personal data on airline passengers, and has publicly said it would not and then goes around and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wjla.com\/news\/stories\/0605\/237099.html\">collects that data anyway<\/a>, don&#8217;t I have a right to be paranoid?  I mean, have these people not heard of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bigfoot.com\">Bigfoot.com<\/a>, or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dogpile.com\">Dogpile.com<\/a>?  Have these people not heard of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dogpile.com\/info.dogpl\/search\/web\/personal%2Binformation%2Bstolen\">databases and brokers, and of hackers<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>I suppose I could have lied, but why spend the time then?  I guess it just boils down to whether or not you trust the government. And I don&#8217;t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s amazing how, when strung together, ten words that are innocuous on their own can form such a terrifying phrase. No, not that one; that one is only eight (and mind out of the gutter, you!). The phrase I&#8217;m talking about is a classic that is probably as old as human civilization: I&#8217;m from the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-266","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-thoughts","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homemaderavioli.com\/woodstock\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}