Failing to crack the code

When Paul Carter lost his cash card, little did he know what he was about to get into. Certainly not his own bank account

Bankers. Oooh, there’s a controversial word to start the column with. I bet you’re frothing at the mouth with ire already. I am, and I can’t even blame it on the drink! Actually though, my problem isn’t with the gits in the striped-shirts and braces, but rather the ludicrous systems of your common or garden high street bank.

As much as I’d like to use this space to launch an anti-capitalist tirade against the downfalls of merchant banking, I fear that would be a little off brief. Maybe next time.

Anyways. I lost my bank card recently (which I can blame on the drink) and had to go through the usual rigmarole of getting the bank to send me a new card and PIN.

This isn’t a new experience, I lose things all the time, but it seems that the particular organisation I bank with have adopted a new, supposedly more secure method of sending out PINs to people.

Rather than just getting a simple separate letter like I used to, I received something akin to a new National Lottery scatchcard, except the prize was merely the right to access my money.

You know, my money. The money that I earned that I then paid tax on that was given to them so they could stay in business and proceed to not let me access my money. That money.

This new method involved having to peel back a tiny cardboard strip attached to the letter, then scratching off the panel underneath, before turning the letter over to try and make out the ludicrously faint letters printed on what looked like speckled knicker elastic.

Needless to say I broke it. Namely by not being able to peel back tiny cardboard strips or scratching off underwear-resembling panels.

Cue me having to visit my local branch, to sheepishly explain how I’d managed to annihilate a simple piece of paper quite so spectacularly.

The bemused man behind the bombproof screen informed me he’d have to “order another one,” which, as I explained, was about as useful as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest.

Bombproof man didn’t look like he understood my point, although that may of course have been due to my slightly inappropriate choice of metaphor. “I’ll have to order you another one,” he repeated, annoyingly.

When my new PIN arrives, I’ll have to find someone trustworthy to open the poxy thing for me. Given my disdain for just about every­body, this could prove tricky.

This whole scenario could, of course, just be a deliberate and ingenious ruse to recruit a slavish army (or rather a no-army) of dependent armless disabled people, forced to depend on the bank for sustenance due to their inability to access their own cash because of a deliberately inaccessible PIN system, therefore propping up a hopelessly failing capitalist system. Maybe. Check in next time to find out. Toodle-pip.