OK I admit it, I'm lost

I thought my luck was in last Tuesday. I went to buy a pie and a chocolate milk for lunch and the attractive young lady behind the counter asked me “Would you live to wave or insert?”

Now I normally have to pay for dinner before one of those two options is presented to me and, as a man of forty with a married look on my face and one too many of those meat pies under my belt, I don’t get that kind of offer very much. I was flattered.

Thankfully, just before I embarrassed myself in front of a large lunchtime crowd, I realised that she was asking me how I’d like to pay for my cholesterol hit. I fumbled my way through the PayWave process (which allows you to become indebted with a mere flick of the wrist) and made off before someone read my mind and wrote a blog about it.

When I first got an ATM card, it was all good. I knew my PIN, I got which side the magnetic stripe had to be when I used EFTPOS (usually on the second try) and that was that. I also carefully developed an impossible to forge signature for credit purchases. Now none of that is good enough. I can wave my card at the machine and not sign anything, I can swipe my card and sign or I can insert my card and sign or PIN – an acronym which, against all the odds, has become a verb as well. Soon my signature will become defunct and I’ll have to PIN – which apparently doesn’t just mean posting random photographs on a virtual wall somewhere – or just wave my card in the general direction of a store. Sometime early next year, I expect my bank to announce that simply staring too long at products will automatically charge them to my credit card. I wonder what I’m going to do with all those bras.

I also got it when my bank told me I needed a password for my online banking. I love online banking; I never have to talk to a living soul or feel that slightly queasy feeling you used to get when you knew the teller was looking at your balance.

Now, a password isn’t good enough. Firstly, it has to be a pass code that Alan Turing and the ladies of Bletchley Park would give up on in despair. It needs to have three capital letters, two non-alpha-numeric characters and no resemblance to my name, your name, my kids’ names or, indeed, any word in any known dictionary. Then I have to have a four digit PIN to complement my password and I can’t just type it in, I have to click the buttons on the ever changing virtual keypad. Then, every so often, I have to be able to remember what I thought my favourite flavour of ice-cream was on that confused day, five years ago, when I set up the security questions.

And I have to do this for every single service I have; mobile phone, social media, banking, electricity account, kids’ school extranet, university servers etc. They all have different rules and passwords and they all need to be changed at random intervals.

Could we not just have one day a month when every password on the planet is changed and one standard for what passwords must look like? I’d even be happy to pay an extra $100 a year in income tax for the government to manage some kind of identity verification service.

When I finally get access to my money, such of it as the kids have left me, I go on the increasingly futile hunt to find something to spend it on.

I want to buy a new widget so, being a man of the 21^st century, I run a quick Google search. Now I have to try to differentiate between the people that are truly selling the product to me, those who are just advertising the product on someone else’s behalf, and those who are advertising the fact that other people are advertising someone else’s widget and are making money every time I click through yet another layer in their labyrinthine maze of pop-ups, prizes and surprising offers only available to men over 40 living in my area.

Including this one. What the hell? Does she have a polar bear coming out of her arse, is it an emphatic statement of “no means no”, or is there a metaphor there I’ve failed to grasp.

 

So I’ve defeated the Minotaur and gotten to an actual retailer. I am tantalised by their offers, impulsively add exciting merchandise to my cart – it took me, as an Australian, some time to realise that we weren’t talking about the virtual version of the suicide machine my brother and I made to roll down hills on there – and eagerly proceed to the checkout.

Now I have to choose whether I’d like it delivered express, super express, deluxe or regular post. There’s no explanation of what the difference is or how they propose to get stuff to me any faster than planes can fly, so I just have to assume that the extra money I pay for the super express is used to bribe Customs officials to put my parcel on the top of the pile. I sort out how I’m going to pay for the goods, create yet another account (and choose another flavour of ice-cream) and then the site tells me that the goods can’t be shipped to my country because Australian Lego bricks are a different size to those sold in the US or some mate of the Prime Minister’s has the market for those books sewn up in this country or some other highly technical and utterly incomprehensible reason.

 

So I give up. As a married man I hate to admit it, but I’m not driving at this point so, I admit it: ‘I am completely and utterly lost’. I might just stick to beer. I can still get that at the pub on the corner – for the moment.

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