Yesterday morning when I went to the World Gym for the daily ritual, the guy at the front desk (a less-than-2%-Body-Fat kind of a guy) looked me up on their computer and then gave me a card with a membership number. I’m now supposed to give them the number when I come in each morning rather than my name!

Yet another number to identify me. I’ve got a social security number, a drivers license number, several bank account numbers, pin numbers, user ids and passwords for computer programs, license plate numbers, frequent flier numbers, Safeway Savings Card number, Avis Wizard Number…. In fact, there are so many of these numbers that I have most of them entered into my PalmPilot PDA that I carry with me almost everywhere so that I can remember the number I’m supposed to use for each situation.

I asked the guy at the desk why I now needed a number. I’ve been going to this gym for more than three years and until Thursday, my name was sufficient. He told me it was so they could "be more efficient."

Now that’s a not-so-novel concept: Inconvenience the paying customer so that the goods and services provider is slightly less inconvenienced! I’m sure this makes the Dale Carnagie How to Win Friends and Influence People top ten list. But even more intriguing is why World Gym needs to have a different identifier for me than my name. I’m certainly not the only Roland K. Smith in the world. In fact, there are probably a couple hundred other people in the U.S. who use the name Roland K. Smith. Despite that situation, however, the Post Office manages every day to deliver the mail destined for me to my house and has never yet in my almost-sixty-years of living, sent some other Roland K. Smith’s mail to me. There aren’t any other Roland K. Smiths in Colorado Springs. In fact, there aren’t any other Roland Smiths in the city, either. So uniqueness in a somewhat common name can’t be the driving issue for the gym.

Sometimes I think that computers assign numbers as primary identification just because it’s so much easier for the person writing the computer program. Programmers like numbers. They work better in the computer than letters. Comparing two numbers, for instance, is much easier than comparing two names. The computer can easily determine that 140 is different than 2500. But the computer just as easily decides that "Smith" is different than " Smith" unless the programmer goes to a bunch of extra effort to write a comparison routine that accommodates spaces in names as well as the length of names.

Although my name is fairly common — particularly when using just the first initial and last name — I do like it and would prefer to be identified by my name. I suspect that the computer didn’t agonize over my number like my mother did over my name. It probably took the computer a few nanoseconds to assign the number unlike me coming home from the hospital unnamed because just exactly the right name hadn’t been decided, yet (compounded by the fact that I was supposed to be a girl and just the right girl’s name had already been picked, but surprise, I was not a girl and so a new, more gender appropriate name, had to be chosen).

United Airlines knows me by my name, even though one of the numbers I have assigned to me is a United Airlines Frequent Flier Number, which I’m supposed to hold confidential and only use in appropriate places. When I call United Airlines and say something like, "Hello, my name is Roland Smith and I’m flying from Colorado Springs to San Jose next Thursday…." The nice person at United Airlines invariably answers, "I’ve got your record, Mr. Smith. How can I help you today?" Even though the record that the reservation agent is looking at is filed in the computer under a record locator number, and my travel agent sends me the flight itinerary in e-mail with the record locator number as the prominent information on the page, United Airlines never asks for that number. It’s almost like the locator number is an inconvenience for them. All they want is my name and any flight information I may have. They’ve even found the necessary data by just using my name. Now that’s a system where the programmer did the complete job. On the other hand, United Airlines is currently having lots of trouble with numbers, in particular the revenue versus expense numbers. Perhaps that’s why they prefer using names instead than numbers?

The guy behind the counter at World Gym said this morning when I came in, "Good Morning, Mr. Smith. Have a good workout." I told him I was now supposed to give him my membership number and not my name, even though I hadn’t said anything to him yet. He allowed as how he was supposed to ask for the membership number, but that since he knew who I was he didn’t need for me to give him my number, as long as his lady boss wasn’t there!She’s apparently the enforcer!

"Well," I told him, "I’ll still just use my name. It’s too early in the morning to try and remember yet another number." As I started my forty-minute-treadmill jaunt, I was watching CNN and the latest news from Iraq and the impending war and thought about how we’re living in a place that we fairly reverently call the home of the free where people have names and convicts have numbers. I think that I’m much more than a number and I plan to somehow forget my new World Gym Membership Number.