By M.P. DUNLEAVEY
> -- Avoid letting your cards out of your sight. Do not let store
> clerks take your card away on the pretext that there's a "problem."
Apparently you would not be able to use your credit or debit card in a restaurant then, since they require you give them the card to swipe at a location out of your sight. (An exception is Sonic fast-food restaurants, where the card swipe device is right on the ordering post.)
-- Restrict the access to your personal data by signing up for the
> National Do Not Call Registryformatting linkremove your name
> and address from the phone book and reverse directories -- and, most
> important, from the marketing lists of the credit bureaus to reduce
> credit card solicitations. The siteformatting linkcan help.
While some people have a need or consider it a status symbol to have an unlisted number, others are not willing to give up contact with many desirable contacts in the outside world who would have no other way to reach them by phone or snail mail.
Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@aol.com
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Not only Sonic, but McDonalds here at least also has a card swiper right by each register. If you have your card in hand, while you are placing your order (or when the clerk turns around to fill it) you can swipe your debit/credit card and have it back in your pocket by the time the clerk asks for the money. They don't care either way; when the register says the order is paid for, that is all they care. Ditto Marvin's Supermarket here: you dump all your groceries on the conveyor belt, the kid starts ringing it up and in the meantime you can swipe your card. The card swiper then seems to 'lock up ' until the clerk does something to tally it on the register; then the card swiper clicks into action (and if you had already swiped your card) it gets busy getting the approval and printing the receipt. If you want 'cash back', the clerk over-rings the total by that same amount. If your order comes to twenty dollars and you want twenty cash back, the clerk rings it on the register as 'amount tendered' forty dollars, 'change returned' twenty dollars. PAT]