Another day at the home office
Coming to readers of The Rust from the “You Just Couldn’t Make It Up” department:
Writing as someone in my eighth decade, I hereby forgive in advance all Rusters of more junior years for either passing straight on to the next piece of wisdom from this mighty organ and/or heaving a sigh of indifferent ennui at the prospect of being assailed yet again by the rantings of a curmudgeonly old git.
Nevertheless, this is a true story.
Modern technology and your author have never had a particularly happy or productive relationship– even from eons ago and the arrival of cassette tape recorders and the early brick-like mobile phones.
I have banked with the same organisation for the best part of fifty-five years, which probably says more about my personality than it should, but it is only over the past five that I have been wrestling with the vagaries of online banking and indeed banking Apps, which everyone including my children have encouraged me to do.
I have never taken to online banking – being fundamentally nervous of having my personal details – and indeed those of my vast unearned wealth – broadcast far and wide across the worldwide web, there to become yet more cannon fodder for the ingenious scammers, frauds, thieves and gangsters that proliferate whenever facilities emerge by which one set of human beings can exploit another, less technology-aware and more innocent, set of similar.
One of my eternal problems is passwords, PIN numbers, customer numbers and the other sundry means of identifying oneself when signing up as a customer of any organisation.
I can never remember any of them.
However, worst of all, as far as I can tell based upon personal experience, is the advent of biometrics as a means to greater “security” over all our dealings with the world.
About a year ago, my bank proposed that I take the opportunity to apply biometrics – in the form of “facial recognition” – to my banking App with them.
I did so – and as a direct result have suffered endless complications, contradictions, frustrations and problems ever since.
Rust readers may be familiar with facial recognition themselves, but for the uninitiated I will just say this.
The thinking behind this new technology is simple. You “take” a photo image of yourself – which then becomes the template by which the App recognises that you are trying to effect some transaction or another.
In theory, after that, in order to actually make any e.g. transfer of money “take place”, you simply have to stand against a mediumly-lit plain background, position your face within an oval slot presented to you on your smartphone by your banking App, and – when the border of said “oval” turns from red to blue – blink your eyes.
The App then recognises that it is you – and Bingo! – your transaction takes place.
Or in my case, doesn’t.
Look – I have never pretended that in the looks department I match Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Sean Connery and/or any other know “heart-throb” male lead in movie history – rather, the movie star I most resemble is perhaps Charles Laughton in the film The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) – but for some reason unknown to man or beast, my “process” of being recognised by my own biometrics facility has never (even once!) worked smoothly.
There has been few more absurd and frustrating experiences in the history of mankind than that of someone standing with their back to a wall, holding a smartphone in one hand and simultaneously moving it – and their face – around (up, down, sideways, diagonally, any way you like) in a desperate attempt to get their banking App to “recognise” them …. and failing.
Having thus failed four or five times, the App then tells you to “Try again” … which takes another minute plus to begin … whereupon you repeat the experience.
After five or six “complete failures” of the attempt, the App then announces it has had enough and you must try again later.
This happened so regularly to me over a six or seven week period that I then travelled to the local brank of my bank and asking a staffer there to “remove” me totally from the “biometric recognition” facility – because, well, it just never worked for me!
However, that move subsequently meant that I was unable to use my banking App to transfer more than £1,000 per day to any specific third party.
Very frustrating that, in itself!
And thus I had my “biometrics facility” restored to my banking App.
Until yesterday, when – in trying to pay a contractor a sum in excess of £3,000 that I owed them, after 17 – yes, SEVENTEEN (I counted them) – failed attempts to be recognised by the “facial recognition” facility on my banking App, I finally gave up …
