On a pretext call to the Oregon DMV, claiming to be a Postal Inspector, I asked the clerk to run a search for anyone named Eric Weiss who had been born between 1958 and 1968—a ten-year period bracketing my real birth year, 1963. I was looking for someone roughly my same age, but the younger, the better. I would be applying for a new driver’s license and Social Security card, and the older my new birth certificate said I was, the more eyebrows my application would be likely to raise: How could a person in his thirties, say, never have needed a Social Security number?