Today I finally knuckled down and got my business a PO Box. Part of the reason was practical: a really silly dollar amount of my clients' checks has been lost in the mail and removing one of the transfer points makes a lost check slightly less likely. But mostly it was because parenthood has turned me into a privacy hypocrite, right on cue.
It's my business to learn the personal details of total strangers. Home addresses, dates of birth, property tax payments...this stuff is effortlessly easy for me to find. Force of practice. Social security numbers are a bit harder but public records aren't nearly as scrubbed as we like to imagine. I find this stuff, I use it for legal and (to me) legitimate purposes and I don't think twice about it.
That's my job. I like it just fine. And until recently I lived the part too. When I had an office that address was on all my promotional materials, but when I started working from home my home address went on the masthead too. Because why not? It's the work of a minute for me to find this out anyway so I assume that's the median ease of discovery. We live in an age of Google and Lexis-Nexis and Facebook and a good portion of everyone's life laid out for the mildly curious to discover. The possibility of some weirdo having the ability to find us and the disposable time and resources to bother us is just another part of the price tag for smartphones and the other modern marvels. Besides, I work for politicians, and despite what you might have heard from House of Cards or the next dramatization, politicians are mostly just dorks and lobbyists in training.
Or so I thought, till the arrival of the Nonvoter. Parenthood is a negotiation of worry, and none of us are immune to that. When I first went into business I was serenely confident that I could handle the worst personal annoyance the job presented. In the other hand, any parent claiming to be serenely confident of anything is crazy or lying. Or both. So now I do think about those clients whose money I am happy to take but to whom I would never introduce my son for eighteen years or more. I think of the criminal records, the domestic disturbances, the obviously crazy candidates. I think about the campaign staff and "consultants" who think street money is a good idea and aren't too picky about who gets that money. I work with all of these people, happily. I even drink with them. They are just people doing their thing, and I can handle whatever comes with the working with them.
But the Nonvoter can't. He can't even handle sleeping through the night or using a toilet.
So the PO Box it is. Is it hypocritical? Certainly. But parenting isn't about internal consistency. It's about diapers and doctor visits and do as I say, not as I've done. I won't even pretend to justify it by saying I'm not running for office so I don't deserve the same scrutiny. There's no moral charge to my job, and there's no value difference between writing a book on myself or some other random taxpayer for fun and writing a book on some random obnoxious Congressman for money.
It's just parenthood: enabling hypocrisy since the dawn of time.
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