It all used to be very easy in Australia, you bought the phone at a supermarket and gave bogus info when registering the SIM. Then the “War on Terror™” began and the government started taking things a bit more seriously started mandating the paper registration forms needed to be completed or the retailers could get in trouble. But your average supermarket worker wasn’t going to take the time to do that and it was way too widespread for the government to actually crack down on it.

Took a few years but the Telcos started actually paying attention to the fact that the majority of prepaid phones weren’t getting completed paperwork at point of sale so they just moved to make all sim card activations require online or over the phone ID checks.

Every bit of training I ever did made it clear it was all about catching terrorists, drug dealers and paedophiles, which of course means “We want all that juicy data without citizens asking any annoying questions.”

It is a really good filter for me, any company that wants to harvest the bogus information I will use to access them had better do a good job of convincing me it’s worth the effort.

I have a similar take on online stores wanting me to create a login to get a shipping cost, unless they are offering a truly unique item, or outrageously good price I just don’t buy anything from them.

If we all had a similar standards these bits of UX fuckery would disappear over time, unfortunately most people don’t even think about it.

Guessing that would be They Live. Haven’t actually watched it myself but cultural osmosis being what it is… Anyway here is some more info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live

Maybe they don’t want the competition?

Does the UK government outsource that sort of service?

Oh please be somewhere you can sue for racial discrimination… Please!!!

There was a time, before Google showed their hand, that I would go out of my way to leave Google reviews. Good, bad or somewhere in between I would document the customer experience.

Since Google made it clear what trajectory they are on I have returned to the old ways. Amazing service gets a letter, great service gets a quiet word to the manager. Bad service gets a word to the manager at the end of the transaction, terrible service and I just never return again and tell anyone who asks why. Everything in between those extremes gets me acting as a polite customer and that’s about it.

Have I over thought this?

Could be worse, some people about a dozen houses down from my childhood home had a Husky and their neighbours got a pet rabbit. Suffice it to say it took all of 3 days to find out a Husky can go through a standard fence, and can go through a standard rabbit hutch. On the plus side the neighbours with the rabbit weren’t home so they didn’t have to watch, just clean up the bits of rabbit before their kids saw.

I’ll never understand people who buy working dogs and shove them in suburbia in lunch box sized back yards.