Proof of age  

I used to work for the Social Security Administration, and this article took me back to the dark days of verifying the age of Social Security claimants. Lots of little known facts here: Filipino immigrants who retired in the 90s almost always faced year-long waits for their benefits because their proof of birth was destroyed by the Japanese in WW2. The birth records of white and black folks born in Mississippi in the 40s are still stored in separate file cabinets, so that if you call the records office to verify someone's date of birth, the first question you're asked is black or white? In the pecking order date-of-birth-proving documents, one of the best alternatives to a certified birth certificate is a family bible with handwritten inscriptions for family members' birth dates. I wonder if LeBron James's family has one.

The district manager, who in this case was my boss (DM is a great federal job, with lots of autonomy and great pay, probably slightly less than a postmaster), has the responsibility of going out to personally check in with nonagenarians and centenarians (and presumably super centenarians), to make sure they were still alive. It wasn't out of care and concern. The story my boss told was about going out to an address listed for one of the nonagenarians and finding that it was underneath an interstate highway that had been built twenty years earlier. The checks, of course, were going to a PO box, and the owner of that box was a former Social Security employee who was living the high life...