Originally Posted by
soitgoes
My account (from the Guest Privileges era), is my initials followed by the month and day of my birth. Have they stopped using DOB in the membership numbers?
(When my mother's account was opened, somehow her middle initial was left out, and so she has an X in between her first and finial initial in her membership number. I don't recall how the account was opened--that was close to 10 years ago!)
Ok, so now if we figure out your name and your birthday, we will know your CP number. Thanks for giving it away!
At any rate, it can't have
always been month and day. Think about it, if John Q Public got an account and his identical twin James Q Public also got an account, they can't
both have JQP followed by their identical birthdates, as then they'd both have the same account number!
So month and day of birth may have been
one way they got the number, but it wasn't the
only way. I have a card from that era, and I can figure out where they got the numbers, but it's definitely not related to my birthdate.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was a manual process back then, and the non-techhies doing it didn't have a random number generator handy
, so they looked over the application and grabbed some digits from it and looked to see if that member number was available. If the first (simple) set of 4 digits they tried worked, they didn't try for anything more complicated. Otherwise they had to keep trying...