Screaming in luxury
Today's spam promised me that [my] watch will be screaming in luxury, which sounds unlikely, I must say. I think the fake designer watch spam got scrambled with the Viagra spam.
Rather than making New Year resolutions, in January I decided that I would do eight things this year, each one dealing with a different part of life - work, creativity, health, and so on. Yesterday, I crossed off the first, and easiest, one (finance: I will finally close that account with nothing in it). That's one thing in four months, leaving eight months to knock off the other seven. Yes, that's going well.
Bank chap wanted to do a review of my banking options when I went to close the account, which, oh, all right then. If we must. And he was quite good really, changing one account type to something that earns more interest. Except when he did that, it generated a new password for my internet banking. 'We'll just SMS that to you,' he breezed. Um, no, you won't, bank chap. I don't have a mobile phone. Well, you'd have thought I'd just told him I'd been living without a heart for all these years. The bank's whole password-changing system is based on SMS. He consulted a couple of colleagues about how to get around this astounding state of affairs, then, because such a thing had never been heard of, he had to ring the bank's help line - the actual help line that we, the customers, would use - and wait on hold for ten minutes (which amused me, I must admit) and get them to tell me over the phone. And then he had to leave the room while I used his computer to log in with my new password and change it again so that no-one else would know. So didn't I feel special?
Rather than making New Year resolutions, in January I decided that I would do eight things this year, each one dealing with a different part of life - work, creativity, health, and so on. Yesterday, I crossed off the first, and easiest, one (finance: I will finally close that account with nothing in it). That's one thing in four months, leaving eight months to knock off the other seven. Yes, that's going well.
Bank chap wanted to do a review of my banking options when I went to close the account, which, oh, all right then. If we must. And he was quite good really, changing one account type to something that earns more interest. Except when he did that, it generated a new password for my internet banking. 'We'll just SMS that to you,' he breezed. Um, no, you won't, bank chap. I don't have a mobile phone. Well, you'd have thought I'd just told him I'd been living without a heart for all these years. The bank's whole password-changing system is based on SMS. He consulted a couple of colleagues about how to get around this astounding state of affairs, then, because such a thing had never been heard of, he had to ring the bank's help line - the actual help line that we, the customers, would use - and wait on hold for ten minutes (which amused me, I must admit) and get them to tell me over the phone. And then he had to leave the room while I used his computer to log in with my new password and change it again so that no-one else would know. So didn't I feel special?