My fingers are dipped in vitriol. The sound of my angry fingers on the keyboard hitting hard in tempo to Brenda Fassie is some indication of how miffed I am. There has been a problem with ABSA Internet Banking. Obviously one of those sad grey-shoed types who work in the Bellville Credit office allowed someone a little more leeway on their overdraft than the SYSTEM allowed which crashed the whole thing. Come to think about it, the possibility of the grey-shoe doing anything the SYSTEM doesn't allow does not exist.
Whatever the reason - not being able to access ABSA Internet is not only frustrating for me but also for people waiting to be paid. Here's the rub. We all have off days (God knows ABSA has loads of them) but what irks me the most is the appalling lack of communication around the problem.
If, like I am, you're an amateur techie, the first conclusion when technology doesn't work is that it is our fault. Now, if ABSA had put a message on the homepage saying - "We have a problem, the grey-shoed folk in credit have thought out-of-the-box and crashed our system" I would understand. However, with no such "help - we're drowning message" on-line nor on the phone, people such as I are left to think the problem is ours and format our computers and reinstall.
While the ABSA site is up now it is not working properly which, in a way, is even more frustrating. Did the payment I make really go through? Where is the new beneficiary I set up?, does God exist? and other important questions.
My wrestling with technology is not newfound. Before upgrading to a bright, sleek fandangle of a machine I believed that my laptop would work or not work directly in response to my needs. The greater the need, the less it would deliver. I still maintain that computers are an alien life form and will takeover human life after giving us all heart attacks in a fit of pique.
If I were handling ABSA's PR, I'd issue a statement to say that as a result of systems going down on World Aids Day and inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of clients they are donating 1 cent for each Internet Customer to an AIDS charity. Who am I kidding - instead I imagine them hiking prices again to pay for the MD to say how great they are in the media.