Apparently my mortgage lender can’t withdraw the monthly payment from two checking accounts at once. My wife and I wanted to do that since the monthly payment was draining my checking account each month, demoralizing me. This morning I tried to configure the automatic payment system to take half of the sum from my account and half from my wife’s. Apparently that’s not possible – according to the CSR, one option is to rely on their helpful business partners which would collect my partial payment as soon as I’d give it to them, hold it to the side for a while (and for a small profit), and then pay it to the lender at each due date. All for a measly few bucks a month, no less. I can’t believe anyone would pay them for the "favor", given that they make money off of your money (if anything, they should share some of the profit back), but whatever.
Sometimes I think that as soon as Britain started the massive industrialization wave several centuries ago, people figured there would eventually be a few dozen farmers left in Iowa and China, some construction workers and a few engineering types keeping the infrastructure up and running, and everyone else would be left without a job (’cause really, there’s no way everyone else will just become involved in art and science, further advancing mankind; people aren’t that smart, maybe a few percent of them are usable for that purpose, everyone else is just sucking oxygen). So they started inventing jobs, just to keep everyone busy. This phenomenon seems rampant in the US, where, instead of fixing simple things (like enabling your customers to give you money from two accounts instead of one), the problem is treated like a business opportunity which keeps dozens of useless business partners around.
Whatever keeps you busy and gives you a paycheck, I guess, but the engineer in me still thinks this is stupid. Not to mention there are hundreds of other similar useless services being provided, my all time favorite being a billion-dollar business, credit monitoring. Picture this: Companies charge about $10/month to monitor one’s credit history, although it’s the kind of thing you can do on your own every ~4 months with a few clicks, for free. Don’t even get me started on the whole identity theft thing – a decent set of privacy laws and severe punishment for ID theft would probably do the trick, but why kill a billion-dollar market? But I digress.
The other stupid thing is that all the e-this and i-that don’t really mean we got any smarter. All it means is that we took real world stupidity and bureaucracy and we moved them in the online world. I did eventually try to make a change to the automatic payment system, but lo and behold, I can’t, because I’m less than 9 business days away from my next payment (that’s about 11 calendar days). Cool – in the age of lightning fast computers, it takes 11 days for my lender’s computers to connect to my bank’s computers and decide if they can talk to each other to accomplish an automated transfer. If anyone ever tells you this is a complicated matter beyond mere mortals’ comprehension, call them on it. It’s bullshit, really – they’re just keeping themselves busy so they don’t have to get real jobs.
Anyway – the bad news is that it looks like living in a technologically advanced place does make you more stupid. As I was scratching my head wondering what to do about this, my wife pointed out the obvious – we can just configure part of her paycheck to land in my account and I’ll keep making the payments. But I’m really panicked now – I need to find things to keep my brain engaged, otherwise the few remaining synapses will soon fade away. The signs are already there.
