This is one of these old American ways of looking after yourself in a world where your address information is being sold to god knows who.
Five or six credit card offers a week, all kinds of other junk mail clogging up the mailbox, made a friend mad and kindled a desire to get even.
Which company sold my address? was the starting question.
The friend, whom we will call Jim Jones for this post, decided on a middle initial scheme. The next time he mailed in a postcard for a free catalog, he used the first letter of the company name as his own middle initial.
The catalog from Best Tire Iron Acme was as cool as expected and addressed to Mr. Jim B. Jones.
The catalog photos served as components of several collages, the old fashioned cut and glue paper artwork so hard to find today.
Lo and behold, several months later, Jim B. Jones received a special offer for Penthouse Magazine. Get a one year subscription for the price of only six months. Act now!
Best Tire Iron Acme (BTIA) or the company that did the mailing campaigns for BTIA had found a way to recoup some of the costs of the campaign by selling Jim's address.
Our friend was pleased at the result of his first new middle initial test and made it a habit. After the first year, he knew, for example, that a now defunct consumer electronics chain sold his address to The Blurry Image and to A DIY store.
Jim Jones even started to draw a network map and updated it every time a piece of mail with one of the fake middle initials showed up.
He never published his network map and refused to give us a copy.
We do not know if he does the same on the webby web these days, but if he has a Facebook profile, it will certainly be one of those profiles where only the last name is real and all the rest of the data are bogus.
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