The Cellar - The Biometric Future

My mom had the chance to catch up with an old friend the other day, and she related a story that completely blew my mind. This woman is about 55 or so, and as a single mom worked a variety of jobs over the years, some of them with a moderate physical component--assembly lines, waitressing, etc. Stuff with her hands, but nothing out of the ordinary.

She recently started a new job at an airport, some behind-a-desk clerical type of thing. As an airport employee, she had to submit to a background check, and have her fingerprints scanned for their biometric ID system, mostly used for logging in and out of the computers. The process is so routine that she had already been training on the job for a week before the results were back: her fingerprints hadn't scanned clearly. Try again. They tried a dozen times, with every piece of equipment they had, but her fingerprints are just old and worn down enough that it was impossible to get enough match points for their system. She couldn't be scanned.

End result: she lost the job. They were very apologetic, and got her paid for the one week under some weird contracting category, since she could not legally have been, or ever be, an employee there. She's not going to fight it as a civil rights issue because A.) she doesn't care about that sort of thing and B.) she didn't like the job anyway.

One would hope that the technology will improve when/if it becomes more widespread, or companies will be required to make use of some alternate source of ID for situations like this. Surely the ADA would have a field day with this...