As we all know, major corporation store huge amounts of data which they use for business. This data includes, among many other things, names and addresses of customers and potential customers. Sometimes though, these corporations come up with crazy names, approximations, and combinations of names based on the originals. I wonder who’s responsible for that? Are there companies out there who make up names and then sell the lists to the corporations? Do the corporations just inflate the databases by adding these mixed up names?
One Chicago reader named Lauren Blameless (last name has been modified for privacy purposes) recently received a letter addressed to “Lauri B Mann”.
Now, Lauren does live with her boyfriend, and his last name is Mann, but how did the corporation come up with this fictional character “Lauri B Mann”? Clearly it is an approximate combination of her name and her boyfriend’s name, but who is out there deriving these strange name combos?
Thanks to a reader from Chicago for submitting the inspiration for this post.
I am not sure who gets paid to do it, but I think that could be a fun job.
I love that the letter is from the ‘Data Integrity’ Department. Address a letter to someone they think exists and then see what happens … brilliant!
‘data integrity’ is so much more official than ‘code created by 20-something year old looking for a laugh’
I hear. Word. They must have had something in their databases to try to combine the names. Kinda scary what info “they” have in databases about all of us.
By the way, you remind me of a doughnut.