annoying to me because my wife didn’t take my surname!

You think that’s annoying? My wife and I aren’t even married.

I mean we call each other husband and wife but we don’t believe is shackling ourselves to one another, even for tax purposes, and we find the ease of permanent separation keeps our relationship fresh, and has for 35 years.

We used to get mail addressed to our house as Mr. and Mrs. <my name> or <her name> and we quickly realized why: it’s just advertisers collecting my name or her name, gender and the fact that we’re married (not legally but we say we are). Absent the name of the spouse, they assume a man would bear his own name and a woman the name of her husband.

Obviously it can’t be anything other than fucking advertisers since we’re not legally married: city or state agencies wanting to send us mail know exactly what both our names and marital status are and use them correctly.

The easy solution is to not provide real data to data brokers whenever possible. We now use fake names, and we also track which names we provide to whom because it’s interesting to see how they bounce back at us.

For example, is she uses the name Elizabeth Corona-Smith to, say, book an appointment at the hairdresser, and I get mail addressed to Mr. Corona-Smith with advertisement inside for arthritis products, I know the online service her hairdresser uses to book appointments sold her data, and the hairdresser filled in her approximate age to add to the data they sold.

With that knowledge, next next time she goes to town, she can give an earful to the hairdresser and tell them she’ll never patronize them ever again.

It’s happened several times. It’s really interesting to see how your information gets sold when you use fake information.