Thursday, March 20, 2008
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Dial ATM for murder...
If you think the title of this blog is dramatic, wait till you hear the reason behind it. It was a weekday like any other . After spending most of the day in front of the computer in my workstation , my colleagues and i decided to step out int he open . After walking for some time inside the iisc campus , I realised i needed to increase my liquidity and the nearest atm was the sbi one at the main gate. Since tat was out of order i decided to use the one next to that , the canara bank one which looked quite harmless mind you . Once inside I inserted the card and it was promptly sucked in! I then remembered tat it was quite standard for atms to do that , and the surprise was because the ones i normally use are the non sucking ones. I was looking at the money counter waiting for the money to come out , but nothing happened. Although i am an experienced programmer with user interface , i forgot for a moment to look at the screen and missed the message which said "please take your card " and then i heard a beeping sound and assumed it was processing some more and after a few more seconds it stopped and the screen said "Your card has been withdrawn for security purposes". And that was the last i saw of that card.
After my fiends had laughed their asses off , I finally got in touch with the canara Bank help desk person who asked me to go to the nearest bank branch , which was in the campus luckily , the next day and get my card. I was relieved and let the incident go as a slight mishap. Everyone at office had a good laugh at my expense and then later my family.
The next day at the bank , a lady told me they didn't have the card and that I had to contact some third party guy who now take care of the missing/captured cards! Missing? captured? As if the innocent cards were criminals or something ! Anyway I could nt do anything further there and contacted the canara bank "missing card \" dept.... that's when I got the shock of my life. I informed him about the incident and asked him when I could get my card back and he said "You card has been shredded". You could imagine my surprise at that moment . After arguing with him and telling him that the system sucked big time especially since shared atm charges were going to plunge following the union budget 2008, I came to the conclusion that there was indeed a lot of difference between user convenience and what the card company's provide in the name of secuiruty.
Looking back at the incident , I could not help but wonder how much a person in dire need of money at that point of time would suffer in such a case. Would you expect a person entering an ATM for the first time to understand that you need to grab the card before its pulled back in ... all that while operating a touch screen or a button on the side user interface which is sometimes even more confusing? I agree that most of the time it would be fine and you would get your money and keep going , but considering tat I am not the stupidest or the least sensible or even most gullible guy walking the roads, there is a high probability that you could lose your card in the same way! And when that happens , here are the damages you are going to entail :
1) If you lose the ATM card in your bank's atm , you might get it back after some amount of id verification. Apparently citibank guys wont do that even because they fear that some one could misuse your card and you would have to anyway get a new one from them ( Rs.100 ) , yay!
2) If you lose your citibank card in a canara bank atm , its gone forever , and you need to get a new one . IMPORTANT ADVICE : Be sure to encash all your reward points before you tell them you lost your card ,or else be prepared with your tpin which then becomes paramount for
verification for them to transfer your reward points to your new atm card!
3) Mental torture, calling up people from different banks and some of the trained people at citibank can be amazingly rude. A lady from the Chennai call centre for citibank was talking to me like a school teacher and like I was a stupid kid . And the worst part was she just could nt get it into her head that everyone does nt know about all the intricacies of credit and debit cards like herself who would have been asked to mug it up many times over. Anyway after a long , distressing talk with a woman, which I am quite unfamiliar with , I decided I am going to start using the frigging tpin from now on at least until i have a frigging citibank account.
Now I am just waiting for my debit card to arrive , in meanwhile I wonder how much things have changed since my dad's time when I used to accompany him to the bank, write a pay out slip and wait impatiently for the teller to announce the token number.... ah those were the days!
After my fiends had laughed their asses off , I finally got in touch with the canara Bank help desk person who asked me to go to the nearest bank branch , which was in the campus luckily , the next day and get my card. I was relieved and let the incident go as a slight mishap. Everyone at office had a good laugh at my expense and then later my family.
The next day at the bank , a lady told me they didn't have the card and that I had to contact some third party guy who now take care of the missing/captured cards! Missing? captured? As if the innocent cards were criminals or something ! Anyway I could nt do anything further there and contacted the canara bank "missing card \" dept.... that's when I got the shock of my life. I informed him about the incident and asked him when I could get my card back and he said "You card has been shredded". You could imagine my surprise at that moment . After arguing with him and telling him that the system sucked big time especially since shared atm charges were going to plunge following the union budget 2008, I came to the conclusion that there was indeed a lot of difference between user convenience and what the card company's provide in the name of secuiruty.
Looking back at the incident , I could not help but wonder how much a person in dire need of money at that point of time would suffer in such a case. Would you expect a person entering an ATM for the first time to understand that you need to grab the card before its pulled back in ... all that while operating a touch screen or a button on the side user interface which is sometimes even more confusing? I agree that most of the time it would be fine and you would get your money and keep going , but considering tat I am not the stupidest or the least sensible or even most gullible guy walking the roads, there is a high probability that you could lose your card in the same way! And when that happens , here are the damages you are going to entail :
1) If you lose the ATM card in your bank's atm , you might get it back after some amount of id verification. Apparently citibank guys wont do that even because they fear that some one could misuse your card and you would have to anyway get a new one from them ( Rs.100 ) , yay!
2) If you lose your citibank card in a canara bank atm , its gone forever , and you need to get a new one . IMPORTANT ADVICE : Be sure to encash all your reward points before you tell them you lost your card ,or else be prepared with your tpin which then becomes paramount for
verification for them to transfer your reward points to your new atm card!
3) Mental torture, calling up people from different banks and some of the trained people at citibank can be amazingly rude. A lady from the Chennai call centre for citibank was talking to me like a school teacher and like I was a stupid kid . And the worst part was she just could nt get it into her head that everyone does nt know about all the intricacies of credit and debit cards like herself who would have been asked to mug it up many times over. Anyway after a long , distressing talk with a woman, which I am quite unfamiliar with , I decided I am going to start using the frigging tpin from now on at least until i have a frigging citibank account.
Now I am just waiting for my debit card to arrive , in meanwhile I wonder how much things have changed since my dad's time when I used to accompany him to the bank, write a pay out slip and wait impatiently for the teller to announce the token number.... ah those were the days!
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