Cf. Doc Daneeka in Catch-22, listed (as a courtesy so he could collect flight pay) on the flight manifest of a bomber that crashed, and that he was not counted to have parachuted out of. His persistent existence was resented by company officers, and eventually his wife.
> > his uncle had bribed a government official with ₹300 to have his nephew declared deceased, in order to inherit Lal Bihari's ancestral land holdings of about 1 acre (0.4 ha). Subsequently, Lal Bihari lost his home. ..... In 1994, the Azamargh district magistrate, Hausla Prasad Verma, declared him to be once again alive. Bihari did, however, allow his uncle to continue farming the land he had stolen
Wow, I would not have been nearly as kind there at the end.
Well, people die all the time, so the process of registering such events is well known - it had to be repeated millions of times, and thus is typically well implemented and optimized.
But people are falsely declared dead, or get revived after being declared dead quite infrequently, and that's why this process is typically not automated and sometimes even entirely missed.
Dead people's identities are also great targets for e.g. spies, illegal immigrants, and money launderers, so governments have a strong interest in making sure the identities of the deceased get turned off promptly and thoroughly.
There's a traditional way to screw over co-workers. On a day they are not in the office, scrawl "DECEASED" on all their mail, and drop it in the outbox. It's said to take years to undo. That long predates computers.
The Motorhead vid was a bit sad, though. R. I. P., Lemmy.
I think this is the first of his stories I've read, and what a treat.
I love this part of his autobio at the end:
> He still stings from having to provide proof to the French authorities that he was not a bigamist prior to getting married. Most countries have such a thing as a Wedding Certificate but in France, there is also an official Certificate of Unmarriedness, and it is a right old bugger to find someone to draw one up when you’re not French. In the end, he persuaded a British consul to sign a letter stating that the aforementioned – a person he didn’t know and had never met – was, as far as he could guess, probably not already married, perhaps, maybe, I dunno, I hope not. The French authorities accepted it without further question.
Back to the story, sometimes here in California we have the opposite problem, where someone really is dead, deceased, an ex-person, pushing up the daisies, kicked the bucket like Jimmy Durante [1], but no one will let him Rest In Peace.
Every week or so I get a piece of mail with an offer for guaranteed issue of a life insurance policy for an acquaintance who died a few years ago. He never actually lived at my address, but through a chain of events his forwarding address was set to here.
Since they are so insistent, I am tempted to fill in one of those applications on his behalf and see what happens. Maybe they will bring him back to life? After all, they do call it Life Insurance.
Nice rejoinder to the mid-20th-century assertion about runaway automation that "we can always just turn it off". Not when it would be against the law to turn it off.
Not at the same level but I recently had to fight for 4 months to get my office location corrected after it was incorrectly recorded. I work in a company office in Seattle but was reporting to a boss in London. I changed jobs within the company and started to report to a boss in Chicago. What I hadn’t realized was that someone marked me as working in the Chicago office.
Sounds like no big deal but then they started witholding state income taxes for Illinois out of my paycheck. My actual home office in Seattle is in a state with zero state taxes so it made a big difference.
It took a month to realize that it had happened, then it took another month to get someone who could change me back to the correct state. Of course they were saying that I would need to wait until next year to file taxes and request that Illinois payback the witholdings. I managed to find some Illinois state tax regulations explaining a process to clawback overpaid taxes and sent that to our payroll team. Finally, after around 4 months, they issued me a check for $3,000.00 for the overpaid taxes.
That was a surprisingly complex process even though this is a fairly modern tech company. Can’t imagine what a more traditional company would have been like. It also taught me to keep a closer eye on that automatically paid paycheck to watch for anything odd.
The first part of the title reminds me of a previous employer, where offboarding was not automated.
I know, because I recall a project to systematize and consistently revoke access to everything for anyone that left.
My point is: automating a process may not make the opposite process easy, but when it's manual, I'd kind of expect things to be no better and maybe worse.
If you don't even know exactly how a person was declared defunct, it can't be any easier to resurrect them.
I suspect you'd have to never cross a border/barrier where ID was required, and you would need to pay cash (or bitcoin) in-person for everything, as you would be cut-off from the banking system. You'd probably also be limited to earning cash in work that didn't require your nonexistent legal identity.
Moving to another country is a safer choice: you get to choose the level of “deadness” you are to your surroundings, if you just cut all ties nobody’s going after you. And you can start a new chapter somewhere you never existed in the first place.
This applies to so many systems that have irreversible status transitions. I have seen this again and again over my career as a developer. A foolproof system is designed and then some fool of a user puts it in a different state from reality, after which it requires all kinds of tricking the system to make it match the observable universe.
By now this should be system design 101: the system should always have an override to move a record from any state into any other state.
[+] [-] ncmncm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worker_person|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttar_Pradesh_Association_of_D...
[+] [-] ev1|3 years ago|reply
Wow, I would not have been nearly as kind there at the end.
[+] [-] drdaeman|3 years ago|reply
But people are falsely declared dead, or get revived after being declared dead quite infrequently, and that's why this process is typically not automated and sometimes even entirely missed.
[+] [-] closeparen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuB-42|3 years ago|reply
No one could un-fire him, the only solution was to hire him again as if he was a new employee.
[+] [-] jagged-chisel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benreesman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|3 years ago|reply
There's a traditional way to screw over co-workers. On a day they are not in the office, scrawl "DECEASED" on all their mail, and drop it in the outbox. It's said to take years to undo. That long predates computers.
The Motorhead vid was a bit sad, though. R. I. P., Lemmy.
[+] [-] Stratoscope|3 years ago|reply
I love this part of his autobio at the end:
> He still stings from having to provide proof to the French authorities that he was not a bigamist prior to getting married. Most countries have such a thing as a Wedding Certificate but in France, there is also an official Certificate of Unmarriedness, and it is a right old bugger to find someone to draw one up when you’re not French. In the end, he persuaded a British consul to sign a letter stating that the aforementioned – a person he didn’t know and had never met – was, as far as he could guess, probably not already married, perhaps, maybe, I dunno, I hope not. The French authorities accepted it without further question.
Back to the story, sometimes here in California we have the opposite problem, where someone really is dead, deceased, an ex-person, pushing up the daisies, kicked the bucket like Jimmy Durante [1], but no one will let him Rest In Peace.
Every week or so I get a piece of mail with an offer for guaranteed issue of a life insurance policy for an acquaintance who died a few years ago. He never actually lived at my address, but through a chain of events his forwarding address was set to here.
Since they are so insistent, I am tempted to fill in one of those applications on his behalf and see what happens. Maybe they will bring him back to life? After all, they do call it Life Insurance.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w00Kab17aeI
"Did you see it? He (slap) sailed right out there!"
[+] [-] LocalH|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncmncm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tagbert|3 years ago|reply
Sounds like no big deal but then they started witholding state income taxes for Illinois out of my paycheck. My actual home office in Seattle is in a state with zero state taxes so it made a big difference.
It took a month to realize that it had happened, then it took another month to get someone who could change me back to the correct state. Of course they were saying that I would need to wait until next year to file taxes and request that Illinois payback the witholdings. I managed to find some Illinois state tax regulations explaining a process to clawback overpaid taxes and sent that to our payroll team. Finally, after around 4 months, they issued me a check for $3,000.00 for the overpaid taxes.
That was a surprisingly complex process even though this is a fairly modern tech company. Can’t imagine what a more traditional company would have been like. It also taught me to keep a closer eye on that automatically paid paycheck to watch for anything odd.
[+] [-] vba616|3 years ago|reply
I know, because I recall a project to systematize and consistently revoke access to everything for anyone that left.
My point is: automating a process may not make the opposite process easy, but when it's manual, I'd kind of expect things to be no better and maybe worse.
If you don't even know exactly how a person was declared defunct, it can't be any easier to resurrect them.
[+] [-] mike_hock|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zen_1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CTDOCodebases|3 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/9FdHq3WfJgs
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkepler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makeitdouble|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alasdair_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamiek88|3 years ago|reply
Declare yourself dead and start again!
[+] [-] asr21|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NullPrefix|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thedanbob|3 years ago|reply
- Someone declared dead will never be declared alive again
[+] [-] Joeri|3 years ago|reply
By now this should be system design 101: the system should always have an override to move a record from any state into any other state.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mrtweetyhack|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]