Word: clerking
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Brandt came from humble beginnings. He was born Herbert Frahm in Lubeck in 1913, the son of an unmarried shop clerk, and reared largely by his maternal grandfather, a truck driver, farm laborer and ardent socialist. The grandson took on the grandfather's political colors and, while still in his mid-teens, wrote for Der Volksbote (the People's Messenger), the local Social Democratic Party paper; in 1930, not yet 17, he joined the party. When Adolf Hitler outlawed leftist parties in 1933, Herbert Frahm took the nom de guerre Willy Brandt, a name common in his hometown. Later that...
Then a few days after seeing the movie, I went to a Cambridge bank to open a checking account. When I recently renewed my driver's license in Washington, D.C., the clerk mistyped one digit in my social security number, which in most places, has become every American's personal identification number for just about every purpose...
Back to the Cambridge bank. The clerk there dialed a telephone number, uttered a few passwords and then returned to tell me that I had an "invalid" Social Security number. By this time, I'd forgotten about the original error in my license, but I was captivated by the phrase, "invalid Social Security number." The woman refused to permit me to open an account. Get this: A bank, of all places, declined to accept my $3,000 because I had "an invalid Social Security number...
...hundreds of millions of Social Security cards that have been issued, in what still is supposed to be a confidential system, I wondered how can a bank clerk determine that my number didn't count...
...were shirking their civic responsibilities. A computer glitch forced the d at the end of Hartford into the column used for information about prospective federal jurors. The result: 5,500 healthy Hartford citizens were listed as dead. "It's caused us a lot of grief," concedes Kevin Rowe, the clerk of the federal court...