I have never been that patient with technology. I can use it to an intermediate degree, and I do consider myself a bit of a geek, but I just do not have the time for it if it starts playing up. A computer has less than five seconds to boot up correctly before I start impotently raging at it and swearing in futility. I even hurt my hand once smacking a monitor around (I told people it was a football accident). I mention this in order to try and explain how I have gotten myself in to this situation.
Basically, after years of putting it off for no other reason than I couldn't really be bothered , I recently set up online banking (although I would almost certainly have saved time overall by setting it up earlier, as pointed out to me by many friends and family) (but then again, they should know that the best way to stop me doing something is to tell me that I have to do it). Regardless, I eventually joined the 21st Century and went to my bank's website to enable this time- and stress-saving solution. Or I tried to.
My memory of this is a tad hazy, but I do strongly remember becoming very frustrated with the security questions section. If I recall correctly, I think it required you to write a question, wait for the page to load, check the question, wait for the page to load, spell check the question, wait for the page to load, answer the question, wait for...you get the idea. And then my browser crashed. Twice. At some point I must have struggled through this process and got a security question set up, so I could finally get in and look at how little money I had. Things were sorted, the browser remembered my password, I had a special locked .txt file with some reminder details just in case, everything was golden.
For about four months. Up until yesterday, in fact.
Yesterday, I tried to access my online banking, but I had apparently deleted all cookies for some reason, and I couldn't remember which password I used when setting that up. Not a problem though, right? They have a system set up to deal with this kind of thing. All I have to do is answer my place of birth, my mother's maiden name and of course, the answer to the secret question that I, myself, wrote. Fantastic. The only problem is that I seem to have phrased my secret question with some profane elements. Specifically, my secret question is "Fuck you, you piece of shit computer".
You may notice that, in fact, that is not even a question. More a statement of intent. I tried a lot of different swear words while guessing the answer, but to date I have not been able to get through. At all. This leaves me with the horrible realisation that I will now have to call Halifax directly and have a conversation about specifically why I cannot get access to my online banking. And I will feel like a naughty schoolboy explaining to his form tutor why he wrote "bums" on the front of his science notebook. That actually happened.
Not every story or anecdote has to have a moral, but I suppose if there had to be a particular message people should take from this, it is not to get overly worked up about technology. And the very second that you try to prove that you are better than the computer, that is when it will burn you as much as possible. I bet this wont even post properly now, the stupid motherf
