I have been actively AVOIDING any sources of information about Harry Potter book 7 spoilers, not wanting to know ANYTHING. ANYTHING.

However, tonight, I might have stumbled across something - WITHOUT WANTING TO - and I am angry about it.

I have been playing this fun word association “game” called Human Brain Cloud. It’s cool - check it out, play it, etc. But whatever you do, DO NOT go to the “view the cloud” page and type in any words even remotely associated with books, literature, magic and obviously anything more closely connected to Harry Potter — unless, of course, you want to have elements given away.

I typed in a general book-related word (just to see what people’s word associations are) and the tag cloud popped up… and the phrase linked to my chosen word read, “__________ dies”. The underlined portion indicates the name of a character in Harry Potter (and I just made it ten spaces long as a matter of counting, not to indicate which name is being omitted); perhaps someone planted this as a red herring, but I have the heavy, dreadful feeling that this is not the case and that this is one of the assholes who read through the leaked photos of the book before they started getting pulled down and could not resist putting the information somewhere out there and potentially ruining the fun for some of us who LIKE to be surprised by even these small things since our lives lack surprise in every other way.

The two little words - white text against that black circle - are haunting me. My stomach actually did a little shocked jumpy thing when I saw it because it was the last thing I expected or wanted to see pop up on the screen there. ANGRY.

I was already pissed before I started because I spent 20 minutes on the phone with Sallie Mae’s customer service people in India explaining that I wanted an address or contact information so I can write to someone higher up at Sallie Mae regarding their practice of sending an email with a PDF attachment to communicate sensitive student loan info. The PDF is not the problem; the problem is that the PDF is password-protected and the password is your #$^^&$%^&#% SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER. Their advice to help you with any security concerns?

Please keep in mind these personal safeguards:

- Save the document to your computer and disconnect from the Web before opening it.

- Only use a personal computer to view the file–do not use a public computer.

Yeah, I’ll go ahead and disconnect my computer from the Internets. Sure.

How many people routinely disconnect from themselves from their ISP (DSL, cable, whatever) these days? At this time, about 50% of internet users are using broadband connections, so there are some folks not constantly connected… but c’mon. Even from a customer service perspective alone - asking people to disconnect from the internet to safely open a PDF attachment??? I’ve got the ethernet cable shoved in the back of the computer and that’s out behind my desk and I am not CRAWLING behind my desk to unplug the ethernet cable for the sake of opening a friggin’ PDF!!!

I called, I waited… and I stated my case. I told them that:
a) my email spam filter automatically marked their email as spam because of the attachment (attachment.pdf). I should think this is a problem… attachment.pdf???
b) while the email address certainly looked valid, there are ways of concealing that info, so…
c) ain’t no flippin’ way I’m going to type my SS# into an unsolicited/unexpected PDF document
d) there are a MILLION other things they could use as passwords that wouldn’t be nearly as sensitive or dangerous in terms of identity theft: say, your student loan account number, birthdate, the password and “challenge” question they require from you on their own SITE to login to your account, a separate alphanumeric password you can only retrieve from the site (if you want to do the paperless thing and get PDFs sent to you)

BUT ULTIMATELY… why wouldn’t a regular old email do the trick? The PDF itself contained a one-page letter. This letter informed me exactly and precisely this and no more:

NAME
ADDRESS
ADDRESS

ACCT #

Dear FIRST NAME LAST NAME,

This is to inform you that your payment amount has changed. Since you are making your payments electronically, we will automatically debit your account for the new payment amount of # beginning on MM/DD/YY. This new payment amount will continue to be debited from your account on the payment due date each month.

You can access current information on your loan [etc., etc.] at www.SallieMae.com. If you have any questions [contact info].

Thank you for the continuing opportunity to be of service.

Sincerely,
Customer Service

[and below this, my total loan amount, interest rate and payments to date]

Honestly, I’d be far more comfortable seeing all the information contained in that PDF right in the body of an email than having to type in my SSID# to access a PDF that doesn’t reveal anything more than the fact that I have a school loan.

Maybe I’m just stressed and pissy. But dude, this is something I might write to the nice folks at Consumerist.com about since the supervisor I spoke with just told me to use the “contact us” form on the website. Uh-huh. Form submissions always get the desired form response, so that’s great.

I love the post that’s currently the most recent on Consumerist, entitled, “Stay Out of Our Comments, PR Douchebags.” Inspired. And right on.

That’s a prime example of a company NOT getting the whole “transparency” thing. This person might’ve been raked over the coals a bit if he/she came straight out and said, “I work for this corporation and here’s how we’re viewing this… we’d be interested to hear your feedback.” - but “Stankwell” would at least have gotten some respect for being forthright. Instead, “Stankwell” registered as a commenter for the first time with the response to this post and made a comment that positively REEKS of corporate-speak spin (including my favorite lines, “they’re gaining access to world-class online banking” and “BofA is a monster — the good kind!” - I regularly talk about my bank and other service providers in this way) and scampers off. Please.

I’m going to go and see if I can find some negative posts about… uh… Verizon (a company I genuinely have no issue with and who’s been my mobile service provider since 1996) and defend them, pulling sentences from their press releases verbatim and using those in comments. That will go over really well because that’s what consumers regularly do, right?

Ah, well. I will now listen to The Cars and enjoy a moment in the eighties.