I am not now nor have I ever been a Scientologist. However, a long time ago on an island far, far away, I got on their mailing list…
Flashback to 1981: I’m on a high school trip to Hawaii. On one of our free time days, a few of us are wandering around Waikiki when some cute girl asks “Do you want to take a personality test?” Sure, why not, it may be worth a giggle or two. After signing in and starting the test, we were escorted into another room with Dianetics posters all over the walls. “Uh…we just remembered we gotta be somewhere…” And we left.
A few weeks later we all start getting junk mail at home. I used the book form to order all the books and paid with Monopoly money (and no mailing address). Months later I paid with rabbit droppings and the junk mail stopped. (I assumed that means they had some way of tracking who returned the return envelopes)
Now jump ahead 34 years and 7 changes of address later (aka yesterday): In the mail addressed to me with my current address was a magazine from the Hawaii branch of the CoS. :eek::eek::eek: Did they detect my engrams? Why, after over 3 decades, am I still in their database, which had to predate computer records? Bwah??? I thought college alumni association fundraisers were tenacious, but damn!!
The Mrs was briefly connected to a CoS-sponsored event, around 1992, and had no further contact with any branch of the group. They have found her new name and addresses to continue sending her cheery magazines and updates through some rather WitSec-level discontinuities. This is not from casual mailing-list reviews and bots.
Everyone’s info is out on the net whether you put it there or not. Google yourself. In the first page of links I can find all of my address and phone numbers. Some even link me to my ex from 2002 and all of her addresses.
Sorry. When I was 15 it seemed like a good idea. I promise I haven’t done it since. I have sent my own smears to a medical lab in properly labelled envelopes.
And now I’m picturing Divine in Pink Flamingoes: “Oh, they sent us a bowel movement!”
Until we moved in 2011, my personal info was not available on the web or through any search - I know, because I tried on a regular basis and even knowing every detail I couldn’t make my home address or phone number come up, or many other common things.
A good part of that was being cautious, beginning long ago, about putting any of that info in places where bots or open lists could get it.
At least twice that CoS found the Mrs, it was CIA-grade spooky.
Back in the 90s, I filled out one of those CoS personality tests in the name of my roommate. They called him incessantly for quite some time. I wonder if they’re still bugging him.
If he exists, my sincerest apologies go out to Charles Francis Xavier, but I’m pretty sure they’ll have a hard time trying to find 1407 Greymalkin Lane in North Salem, New York.
Speak for yourself. I have a fairly unusual last name & googling for [“firstname lastname”] gives 12,000 results. None through page 20 (i.e. the first 200 hits) are me.
I tried one of the whitepages people-finder sites that advertises on search results like this. They have 135 guys worldwide with my first & lastname. I looked at the teaser screen of all of their hits, and suspect one of them is probably me or at least partly me. But as far as they’d let me drill down for free it still didn’t get to my current or immediately previous contact or address info.
I don’t try to hide online; I just don’t try to be advertise myself either.
I have told my story in numerous Scientology threads. I once ordered some scifi books from Galaxy press. I did not know anything about Hubbard at the time, I was just a voracious scifi reader. This was long before email, I ordered through the mail. I moved a couple times and the last time I moved I did not do a change of address with the post office. They still found me and I continue to receive mail from them. They also found my email, I have blocked numerous seaorg and other Scientology related emails but every so often a new one shows up.
I still have those books packed up somewhere and once I get my garage cleaned out I am taking them to the recycling bin. Normally I respect books, I figure if I don’t like it maybe someone else will and I will donate them, but I will not inflict these ones on anyone else. Somehow they know, they probably have tracking devices in them.:eek:
And I have a very common (top five) last name and a very common first name (top 5). When I googled first-name last-name, I had not seen myself in over 400 hits. When I added my middle initial, I started to get generic “matches” (Tom Firstname and Jerry Lastname), so I quoted the whole string and searched for that. After 5 pages, I still had not seen any mention of my name, but my Facebook profile photo showed up in an “Images” section.
To be honest, and not that I’ve done it myself, but I think it should be fine to send feces in the mail, as long as it’s stored properly, namely dry feces in a plastic bag and wet feces canned in tins.
It could be that someone in HI finally got around to putting that box of old, old records into the database. And once in there, it generated automatic mailings.
