Futures and Options

Told you I’d continue it someday.

This is not so much a “thing” in the sense of a named event or entity, but it’s still a situation that baffles me:

For the past several years, I have been receiving E-mails intended for someone else due to a similarity in our addresses.  Mildly annoying because the majority of these misdirected E-mails have been the result of this other person mis-typing her own E-mail into form subscriptions or contact lists, so it’s not like strangers are making the typos; she should know her own E-mail address.  Yesterday she enrolled in online banking through Wachovia.  Using my E-mail address.  Ponder the consequences of that for a moment.

All of that, however, is mere background to the upcoming absolutely stunningly illogical event that is about to occur.

Being a (relatively) nice guy, I forward the welcome message to Wachovia’s customer service department notifying them that I did not have an account with their company and that I should not be receiving information about someone else’s bank accounts.  (It might just be me, but I don’t think it’s a particularly good thing for strangers to receive each other’s banking information.)  I received the following response from Wachovia:

Unless you are a customer, we are unable to de-enroll your e-mail address.

That’s right.  Because I was not a customer, they refused to stop sending me E-mails containing someone else’s account information.

In the meantime, while waiting for their reply, I received a “daily balance notification” letting me know how much money was in an account that didn’t belong to me.

I notified Wachovia again.  Same response.

Unless you are a customer, we are unable to de-enroll your e-mail address.

After receiving several more E-mails from Wachovia containing information about an account that did not belong to me (and notifying Wachovia each time), I finally received a reply from a higher-level customer service manager.

I have contacted the customer who had your e-mail address on file. I have found that there was a typo in the e-mail address. I have taken care of this issue.

A few minutes later, I received an E-mail from Wachovia’s automated online banking system:

Our records indicate that you recently added or made a change to one of your email address(es). This notification is to confirm that you initiated this change.

All it took was repeated pushing on my end to get them to correct the issue.  If I had given up after the first response, I would still be receiving information about an account which I do not own.

It should not take repeated notifications on my part for a bank to stop sending me the account information for a stranger.  They should have suspended the account’s automated E-mails immediately after my initial notification to them and then contacted the account holder about the mix-up rather than doing nothing until I harassed them enough to get it kicked up to an upper-level representative.

Wachovia, I have a suggestion for a new slogan:

Online banking security; we’re doing it wrong.

You aren’t Hank Rearden either.

If you’re female, it’s pretty much a dead cert that you aren’t Dagny Taggert.

Really.  I mean it.  At best you might be Eddie Willers or Cherryl Brooks, but you’re not motive power.  If you were, you wouldn’t be striking up  superficial conversation with someone in an airport strictly on the basis of the book he’s reading.

Just saying…

The rural Australian town of Bundanoon, an otherwise unremarkable bedroom community for Sydney, made a desperate grab for news headlines today by supposedly banning the sale of bottled water within the town’s boundaries.

While ostensibly enacted to combat what the town feels to be a waste of resources (in bottling and shipping water that is more efficiently delivered straight from the tap), it should be clear to any thinking person that the ban’s true motivation is simply good, old-fashioned, selfish NIMBY-ism.  A few years ago, a bottled water suppler proposed to build a water extraction plant near the town and, like all good bedroom communities fearful of industrial developments harming their presious property values, Bundanoon has resisted the proposal tooth and nail.  The supplier’s proposal is still fighting Bundanoon’s obstructionist legal challenges and the passage of this new law ultimately represents little more than petulance on Bundanoon’s part.

The fact that this “ban” is ultimately a mere “feel-good” measure is patently obvious to anyone who reads far enough to see that it carries no penalty whatsoever for non-compliance.  That’s right boys and girls, compliance with this so-called “ban” is entirely optional.  The same people who got on a moral high-horse about the inefficiencies and wastefulness of bottled water have, in their woefully misguided zeal, gone through the inefficient and wasteful process of creating an unenforceable law when the same outcome could have been obtained more efficiently simply by going door-to-door and asking the businesses to stop carrying bottled water.

Well done lads.  You’ve wasted everyone’s time and spent taxpayer dollars to do something that could have been done for free in less time.  *golf-clap*

Nothing like a little John Phillips Sousa on Independence Day…

Editor’s Note:  I was away from the blog and did not see this in my publishing queue until today; the delay is entirely my own fault and not that of Mr. Nebulosa.