I am a firm believer that there is a large amount of technology out there which is a solution looking for a problem and this belief was completely validated in a visit to my bank on Tuesday. I will not use the auto- deposit system. If it it doesn’t work, the bank has my money and I have a problem. I go to one of the charming ladies at the counter. They smile at me (poor old fella, probably doesn’t get out much), they wish me good morning and they check what I am doing. The machine may be “more efficient” whatever that means, but it isn’t better.
I have a deposit account. I give my lady friend the cheques and the account card, she enters them into the system prints a receipt and off I go. That’s what used to happen. Now we have a new automated system. I have to fill in a deposit slip and hand this in with the cheques. Her shiny new machine then reads the cheques and the payment slip using OCR, or it doesn’t because a) it can’t read my writing and b) it reads all the cheques missing out the last character and so reducing their value by 90%. After three tries and manual intervention the Angel finally managed to complete the transaction and give me a receipt. I enquired politely, as a shareholder, how much the new system had cost? “Oh lots” she said with a sweet smile. Wonderful!
Peter Guest
Comments