woolrich

It was chilly here today. I was out with the kids. I wore my favorite red Woolrich shirt. That shirt reminds me of the company every time I hang it up. You can't beat a heavy cotton flannel assembled in Sri Lanka when you want a reminder of a small Pennsylvania wool mill and America's lost textile economy.

I've had the shirt for many years. Still more years ago, I went to a Woolrich factory outlet in California and bought a brilliant windbreaker from them. Plastic fiber. The kind of jacket that can be folded, still damp, into its own pocket and left to mildew until you need it again.

My windbreaker never made it to that part of its life cycle, at least not in my care. I like to think it was sucked out a convertible somewhere on some twisty segment of the Pacific Coast Highway. It was probably left on the back of a diner chair instead.

I learned a lot about outlet shopping with that windbreaker. I had thought that the real trick was to inspect merchandise carefully before you bought to avoid visible manufacturing errors. I realized soon after that an outlet garment with no visible flaws must have either hidden flaws worse than a simple missed stitch or marketing flaws that left it unfit somehow for general consumption.

The jacket may have been just the wrong color of blue/green that year. I think it was consigned to the outlet for a deeper flaw. It had a velcro closure over the zipper. I soon found that the velcro was installed the wrong way around. The stiff, hooky part of the velcro faced in toward your body . If you happened to be wearing an actual wool sweater of the type formerly made by Woolrich, it would happily engage the jacket and serve as surrogate velcro loops. The sweater usually lost those encounters. I ruined a couple that way before I figured it out.

All of this came to mind today when the ACLU called.

I don't have a lot of outlets here where I live. I do have MicroCenter. They serve a similar purpose. They remainder lots of products with hidden flaws. The Philips DECT phones I bought from them a couple of years are a good example. Their chargers absolutely destroy the rechargeable batteries in the phone. I have to replace them every year. The last one died during the election season this year. There didn't seem to be any good reason to get the phones back on line until well after the robocalls subsided. Today was the day to bring them back. If I had thought more clearly, I would have waited till after the year-end giving people hung it up.

Not ten minutes after I got the phone reconnected, the ACLU called looking for more money from me. I've never given them my private, unlisted home telephone number. There are lots of reasons not to. The most compelling is that I don't even know it. Nobody does. My wife has it buried in a phonebook entry for me somewhere. She never dials the actual number manually. She probably only saw it once, a decade ago, when putting it into her cell phone.

The ACLU called looking for me by name.

Somewhere along the way, my local telco sold my unlisted number to some database types who thought that the cleverest thing since the gateleg table would be to fuse this info with their existing donor contact info so that they could reach out in new and unwelcome ways.

I only pay my telco $2.50 per month for not printing my name in their directory. They could hardly be expected to make ends meet on that alone. It must cost them at least $4 per month just to not print it!

The ACLU is not the only guilty party. Since this privacy breach, I have received lots of calls from organizations that I support that suddenly have that number. The call center drones all insist that I must have furnished the number. It is on their screen, is it not? They dialed, did they not? I have given generously in the past, have I not?

The Free Software Foundation, bless them, has not pulled this trick yet. I hope the fused dataset can only be read with non-free tools. They survive to get money from me for another year.

Thomas Wolfe says you can't go home again. Certainly not if you lived in most US mill towns. My local telco says you can still call.