Memorise, Destroy

Published on 19 April 2005 in , ,

So I’m switching my current account, and naturally that means a new debit card. And with a debit card, you need a PIN.

So I open the envelope and there’s my shiny new PIN complete with message telling me to destroy this slip and memorise my number.

Move onto the next piece of post. It’s from the Alliance and Leicester as well. Apparently I need a PIN to use phone banking. Here it is. Destroy this slip. Memorise this number.

And onto the next piece of post. It’s from the Alliance and Leicester. With every current account, you automatically get a savings account linked to it (why I haven’t worked out as it’s got a crap interest rate). Anyway to use the phone banking on this savings account, I need a PIN. Here it is. Destroy this slip. Memorise this number.

Three new PINs in one day.

As it is I now have three current accounts (one semi-dormant cos I never got round to closing it, and one new one) with three debit cards. Then there’s the joint current account I have with Catherine for bills and wotnot. And that’s got a debit card and a PIN. I also have a main credit card and a spare credit card. And of course that’s all Chip and Pin now isn’t it.

So in my wallet are six cards with six different PINs. Plus two for phone banking. And whatever else I have set up for banking – truth be told every time I phone the Halifax about the joint account I end up having to deliberately enter the wrong things for the security questions as I just have no idea what on earth we’ve set up as the answers, which means one simple phone call to do something trivial like order a new debit card cos the replacement one never showed up, turns into a five hour ordeal whilst I get passed from operator to operator to reset the things that got reset last time I tried to do this madness six months ago.

Quite how they expect people to memorise these things without writing them down, well I don’t know – it’s nigh on impossible, and yet they still want to give you more of the damm things…

And security experts wonder why some people set their computer passwords to be ‘password’…