January 25, 2009

• A Pleasure Doing Business With Ya

  “I can help you here,” the bank teller called to me.  I walked up to her and explained, “Yes, I am simply in need of a PIN number.” 
  “I can’t help you with that, we’re not even allowed to see them.  You’ll have to see one of our bankers,” she responded, indicating behind me.  Turning around I saw the only working banker busily engaged with a woman at his desk, and thus I found a chair by the door, grabbed a magazine, and began to wait.

  Unfortunately the woman left before I had finished a most interesting article, and the banker strolled up to me while asking in a friendly manner, “How can I help you?” 
  “Just need a PIN number is all.”
  “Come on back, we’ll take care of ya.”

  He pulled up my account and let me enter in my PIN number of choice on the little keypad they have.  The computer wouldn’t accept the new PIN for some reason though, and and so he called someone to figure it out.  After his brief phone call he explained the situation to me.
  
  “Alright, so here’s the deal.  Your PIN won’t start working until midnight tonight.  After that, you’ll be good to go.”
  “Oh, okay.  Well, I’m just trying to log onto my account online, and I forgot both my PIN and my account name and password, either of which will help me log on.  So there is another avenue of attack.  Can you just find my account name and password?”
  “Oh yeah, sure.  Let me just look it up here real quick.”
  A few moments went by as his nimble fingers worked at the keyboard. 
  “Ok,” he started, ”Your username is ‘ihatechasebanking1.’”

  ihatechasebanking1—complete shock instantly flooded my mind at the words.  Time slowed down to a near halt.  Every one of my brain cells froze in place as they heard the news that has just arrived.  The banker immediately looked over at me after reading it off the screen, seemingly in expectation of some kind of an explanation.  For a moment my expression looked like it would if in the morning I had opened the front door to get the paper, and the world outside was not my normal suburban neighborhood, but the Cretaceous period, full of dinosaurs and volcanoes.  The banker and I stared at each other with nonplussed faces for a moment—and then it hit me.

  It was a month ago, very late at night, and I was trying to pay my first ever credit card payment.  This required finding papers with account numbers, figuring out how to find the visual to a check online, and trying to discern the numbers at the bottom of the blurrily displayed check.  All of these, especially amidst a time crunch, became especially frustrating.  By the time it came time to make an account name, and when the first few account names I normally use were already taken, my mind found the situation a convenient avenue for expressing the somewhat less than benign feelings I was experiencing toward my bank.

  Little did I know this seemingly innocuous peccadillo would eventually set up this most interesting situation a month later, in which I would learn from a Chase banker himself that my account name was ‘ihatechasebanking1.’  The feeling was not unlike what I suppose the main character at the end of an episode of The Twilight Zone would have felt.

  “Would you like to change that today?” he asked a few moments later.
  “Yeah, let’s go ahead and change that,” I pulled myself out of my laughter to respond. 

  • 1:12 am
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