Banking in the 21st Century

Have you ever noticed that Tim doesn’t do a lot of things that regular people do.  For example, he doesn’t have a bank account, no need to go into the reasons why, he just uses mine.  Some of his earnings are transferred into my account, since Tim hasn’t an account of his own.  It’s a bit like money laundering I guess.

The other day a money transfer arrived by email.  To complete the transfer I have to open my on-line account.  No problem, I’ve done it hundreds of times.  Confidently, I enter the account number and the pass-word, only to be informed by the computer that I had it wrong.

 In my haste, I must have made a typo, so the second time I entered the information very carefully.  But again, the computer said, no.  On my third try, also unsuccessful, I took the account number directly from my debit card. 

It was then that I realized the problem was the pass-word, not a mis-typed account number.  The pass-word didn’t work, because the ‘caps lock’ thing had been inadvertently turned on.

After the fourth failure, I learned something I never knew about on-line banking: If you enter a pass-word incorrectly three times, you have to have a new pass-word.

 By the time I reached this point I was well passed frustration, edging toward rage.  And the bank’s verification procedures for new pass-words almost put me over the edge.  But, luckily, I was successful on my third try.

Finally, I opened my account with my brand-new pass-word.  I selected ‘money transfers’ from the menu, and clicked on it.  After a moment, the following message appeared on the screen:

“This service is temporarily unavailable.  Please try again later.”