PIN - Money, Honey, Not So Funny

This morning, I staggered to the table -- this getting up early because the offspring does it really has to stop; if we home schooled, classes would start at noon -- and flipped on the laptop, intending (hoping) to see that McCain had blown it big time, delivered a leaden... you know the drill. Instead, I got to futz with the computer.

At first, email downloaded a couple of messages, but the browser -- neither one -- would start. Then I shut down email and started it again, and it wouldn't start, either. There is a certain I can't breathe sense of panic when you want to connect to the net, and you can't. You almost need an OnStar for the PC --Sir, we've detected a lack of connectivity, are you all right? -- but of course there's an obvious flaw with that logic. So I took a gulp of coffee and rebooted. When it came up, I didn't watch it -- I have this superstition that, like a cat, if I watch it, then it will not do what I want, but if I dum-de-dum, golly, look out the window, it'll think itself unobserved, and go ahead its business. I tend to anthropomorphise the PC -- it wants to do this, it didn't like that. I know it's not really that way. And you know what they say: Don't anthropomorphise your PC; it hates that.

So I hummed and jittered, and it came up, delivering more emails (where did the first ones come from? What were they, stuck in a buffer somewhere?), one of which was from my bank saying that an automatic transfer from one bank to another had occurred. In fact, they sent me two non-identical notes, three hours apart, to announce it. Oh, man, did these idiots transfer it twice? I'd better go look.

So I sign into the receiving back and - password rejected? Eh? Now, I don't type my password. It's actually part of a sentence I keep in a text document, and I cut and paste it when I sign in. So there is NO chance that I typoed it -- but every so often, the C&P picks up the trailing space, and of course the damn receiving system reads that space as a hex gazattabit (thats a technical term), barfing on the signon. So I did it again, getting the same result. I did it again, this time typing it in, and it still didn't work. Finally, I trudged through their reset your password screen, reset it, and then I was in. Finally.

Then I get an email from them telling me that my PIN has been reset. PIN, I think. I didn't reset the PIN. I don't even know what the ATM card's PIN is. Then I remember: this bank called all security info 'the PIN'. So I ignore it -- yeah, I know, I reset it -- and then I think what if someone actually DID reset the PIN, the actual one, not the password I just did? So I sent them a note, and in a day or so, I'm sure I'll get a stiff worded response that essentially tells me nothing. They're good at that.

As for what started all of this, my wife made me promise not to freak out if I found anyone who said McCain did a good job. I'll try.