There can be only one!

I posted a while back about having my identity stolen.

Basically, the Friday before Memorial Day, my wallet was stolen, and over the last month, the thief committed all kinds of fraud and forgery, both against my stuff and against other people using my ID. I dealt with the necessary visits to governmental and banking type places, and am not out anything but my time and a colossal boatload of stress and annoyance as Mizz Identity Thief kept turning up in creative new places – like the time she visited my bank, all dressed up in her finest finery and clutching my driver’s license, asking if she could please change the account address. My bank was kind enough to email me the pics from the security camera, which I was vindictive enough to post all over the internet.

And if she wants to sue me for posting her identity-thieving ugly face all over the internet identifying her as an identity thief, she can bring it.

Anyway, last night the police from a nearby suburb called to let me know that she tried to commit yet another forgery-related series of felonies against a harmless innocent bank, but this time she got caught. She was

In Custody.

Which are two of the most beautiful words in the English language as far as I am currently concerned. She is Someone Else’s Problem. She’s not going to turn up as part of some weird cult of satanic serial killers misidentified under my byline. I’m not going to wake up to a SWAT team with a warrant because some pinhead of a thief shot up a bank, my bloodspattered California driver’s license clutched in her hand. Instead, she is in the custody of my honorable bureaucratic brothers and sisters, who are seeing her as One Of The People Who Is The Reason Other People Have To Stand In Line.

During all this, I had many musings on the nature of Identity itself. After all, I spend much of my time as a troll or a zombie or one of many sims, and these days my only public identity is under pseudonym, like this blog. I don’t social network because a lot of my friends are on different sides of various kinds of socially-perceived gaps and boundaries, and if they realized that, drama could ensue despite the fact that they all have good character and a clever sense of humor along with typing skills.

I’ve seen people get every bit as upset over getting keylogged as I got when my bank account got jacked – with one small exception. Lack of an ATM card meant I couldn’t just summon food to my house, and lack of gold has never affected me on the physical realm so as to impair my survival. Still, the emotions seem remarkably similar.
Identity is time invested. Whether that time was spent going to college, developing a sim or grinding to level 80, those are your experiences and you earned them. They are yours on a primal, foundational level. If someone tries to take away your end result, you’ll get cranky.

The thief is in jail, with the other criminals, wearing orange. She needs a really long timeout some place where she can’t steal things and she should be forced to give everybody their stuff back. If she’d run off to the grocery store to buy milk and diapers and donations to shelters for homeless rabbits instead of robbing banks and live action roleplaying that she’s me, I might be sympathetic.

I am in a festive mood today.