I’m sure this is a poke at the idea that the bank was tiny and nothing had changed in decades, but the “Arthur Dent” customer is clinging to the vestiges of ancient ancient age even though everything has changed.
For the record, the last time I had an account number of 5 digits or less was in the 1980s at a local bank which had exact two branches.
I worked in IT for a company that had rather sharp distinctions between the developers (the gods) and the support programmers (the peons). I can’t tell you the number of projects rolled out by the developers that got dumped in the laps of us peons to “fix.” I can still summon a small part of the rage I used to feel nearly daily.
It must have felt like a sous chef being asked to fix the meatloaf the head chef cooked that substituted feces for ground beef.
Sometimes it did.
Oh, and my account number with my credit union is five digits! I do have accounts at two other banks (and peripherially at a third).
My bank account number is 8 digits long, so not much longer than 5.
It’s a tiny little bank nobody has ever heard of, Bank of America.
No kidding. I’m betting there was a LOT of pressure to meet the project deadlines, in spite of known flaws and stuff like that.
There’s a strain of thinking in IT departments that is IMO, counterproductive. This strain of thought is essentially that the “perfect” project is one that was delivered on time, where no bugs were found, and no rework was needed.
I’ll grant that it is the Platonic ideal- that the developers got everything so right that testing went smoothly and no bugs were found, and everything is awesome.
But in the real world, there are always bugs. So if you’re not finding them, you’re not doing it right. And here’s where the strain of thought goes awry- finding bugs isn’t a problem, it’s a good thing. Rework/fixing is good, as you’re getting the problems fixed before you roll it out, even if you delay the rollout. But project managers and other high managerial types seem to be more concerned with meeting arbitrary deadlines and making sure that boxes are checked for auditing purposes, etc. rather than delivering a working and quality solution. As if somehow delivering a half-baked solution on time is better than a fully baked one a couple of weeks late.
I’ve never understood that, from when I was a 24 year old new developer to now when I’m a nearly 51 year old senior manager.
I’m not sure what lies below “peons,” but whatever it is, that’s where I was in the project I mentioned above: infrastructure support, whose mission was to keep the [expletive deleted] system running through crashes, memory leaks and disconnects among five(!) levels of servers.
Didn’t help that the development was being done by an outside contractor, which was essentially untouchable (not to mention unreachable).
Didn’t we have a thread/topic on “IT Horror Stories” at one time?
I’d say you were in the category of “friends.” I always appreciated the people who supported my work and saw no reason to either pull rank, as it were, or needlessly antagonize them…unlike certain persons I could name. Yeah, looking at you M.Lok. 
Thanks all. The Bank finally got it sorted out. I can see my accounts. It was kinda scary for a couple of days. I mostly wanted to bitch about it. What a mess.
New web site will take some getting used to, but they always do.
Yep, my credit union here in Podunk, KY still uses 5 digit account numbers. The bank I worked at in Chicago bought banks in Indiana and Wisconsin, so we used a 10-digit number where the first two digits indicated the state the account started in.
and aren’t the canadian dollars metric now? … thats another layer of complexity in an already high-risk-conversion process, as all smart people on SD know
to the OP … don’t you have a bank-governing-body in canada? … I stopped calling my local providers (be it bank, telco, etc…) whenever there are problems and file a report directly (website!) at the Superintendencia as it is called here …
this ruffles quite some feathers, and normally I get a return call from a knowledgable individual, trying to put out the fire in this high-risk-complain… (as opposed to the cheapest tier-1 contact-center-drone in a country far-far-away, who is reading me a script).
I live in the US. Colorado.
It did get sorted out though. A few hours of my life I would like back or be able to charge for.
I agree with this one. My main bank is a credit union that I’ve had for over 30 years now. Rock solid and great to work with. Previously, I was with Seafirst which became Bank of America and became even worse to deal with than Seafirst. That’s when I jumped ship.
It’s funny because I never had Seafirst (though I remember it being everywhere when I was younger). I went to Bank of America after getting fed up with my previous banks that kept screwing up over and over. Mystery charges, missing money, etc. Each time I had to go into the bank and explain the problem and they’d eventually figure it out and fix it, but after having back-to-back-to-back problems (in a couple months) I said to heck with them.
This happened at two different ones; Kitsap Federal Credit Union, then Washington Mutual after I got tired of KFCU. WaMu was better at first then had the same problems.
But I’ve had Bank of America for almost 25 years and never had an issue. They’ve always been great to me. It’s so weird that my experience is so much the opposite of what I keep hearing from people.
I was poor when I had BoA. I think your banking experience can vary widely depending on the amount of money they are handling for you. At least that has been my experience. The same is true in other areas. When I was poor and drove POS cars, I was routinely pulled over for minor things, often twice in one night. Better class of car and those things just go poof and disappear.
So was I. In fact, I was unemployed and living on people’s couches when I joined them. I’m doing well now, but I wasn’t when I was in my early 20s.
That blows my theory. They were awful and started charging me for looking sideways at an ATM and other sundry items. I never got so many charges, including a charge just for having a bank account, until they took over.
Sounds like the OPs bank’s system was working, but their credential/login system was FUBAR.
A lot of banks charge a lot more fees now than they did 10, 20, or 30 years ago. had your old small bank never been bought, or bought by somebody else, you’d probably find the nuisance fees are more than they used to be.
For damn sure, the banks charge the po’ folks a lot more than they charge the middle class folks, much less the comfy class folks. And that “innovation” really got going in the IIRC late 80s. They do NOT want po’ folks as customers. Not even a little bit. They can’t legally discriminate, but they can legally disincentivize. So they do.
Yeah - Sorry for the sidetrack. Sounds like an awful situation for OP.