The episode that led to this modest certainty being embarrassingly shattered began with my attempt at using the fairly recent innovation of on-line banking. I use on-line banking sparingly. I am not yet weaned from the pen and cheque method of money transfer. It so happened that I had not used the on-line facility of my bank for over a year. Had I known that sporadic use of on-line banking only caused the bank’s computer system to treat an occasional customer with suspicion, if not downright hostility, I may well have foregone its use altogether. But bliss as I was in my ignorance of the mysterious ways in which the security of on-line banking worked, I proceeded blithely to tackle the first hurdle that confronts all customers of internet banking: the secure log-on. This consisted of a combination of three security parameters including a user-id, a so-called passcode, and a six-digit pin number. I had entered all of these with great care and utmost attention, when to my alarm, the log-on process asked for further, entirely unexpected security information that I was totally unprepared for. The log-on process, quite capriciously as far as I could make out, suddenly demanded to know what my father’s middle name was. Now I am aware that these kind of personal questions are a part of the checks and safeguards that are embedded in on-line banking systems for security purposes. Typically such security questions are asked when the user is unable to provide a valid password or has completely forgotten what it is. But I was incredulous that of all the questions that the system could have put to me for an additional security check, it should have been that about my father’s middle name. My incredulity was not as misconceived as might be imagined. It so happens that in the matter of security questions of this kind, the user usually has a choice of several security related questions from which he may choose one, whose answer would be something personal to him. Thus the user may opt, for example, to use the name of the last school that he attended, as the security question for an additional security check, - should it become necessary. My preferred security question has always been the one that asked for my mother’s maiden name, or so I had always believed until recently. I have a good reason for preferring to do so. My mother’s maiden name although of Indian origin happens to be sufficiently short and simple to make it easily pronounceable, even for those who as a matter of principle remain averse to pronouncing foreign names. My father’s middle name on the other hand, whilst also of Indian origin or perhaps because of it, is a tongue twister of such ferocity as to defy all normal rules of English pronunciation. To attempt to pronounce it is to submit to a verbal form of sado-masochism. I would therefore never have inflicted it on anyone even as a response to a security question, - or so I had convinced myself until being asked for it unexpectedly by the bank’s security system. My unshakable belief that I could never have used my father’s middle name, provoked in me such an unsettling feeling of paranoia that I convinced myself that somehow my personal details on the bank’s security system had been compromised, - most likely as a consequence of some nefarious hacking activity of which lately there seems to be so much coverage in the media.
The dark underworld of hacking and cyber fraud holds unspeakable terrors for ordinary mortals like me. Amateurs that we are, we only skirt on the edges of the internet and have only a superficial understanding of its intricacies. I decided therefore that I needed urgently to seek expert help to deal with this frightening security beach. In great agitation, I phoned the helpdesk of my bank. The helpdesk assistant that I was connected to, was almost a model of courtesy and effortless efficiency. After successfully completing the inevitable security checks, I explained to him the purpose of my call: my possibly baseless but firm conviction that my security details had been tampered with. If this grave pronouncement had the Helpdesk adviser sitting up in alarm, my account of what had actually occurred may well have had him intrigued and possibly even hanging his head in despair: what was he to make of a customer who alleges that his so-called unique security question has been tampered with and replaced by a fake one? Conscious of the likely implausibility of my contention, I was hesitant myself as I began to explain to the adviser my reason for believing that the security question I was presented with could never have been one of my choice, - that my father’s middle name was so excruciatingly unpronounceable to native English speakers, that I would never have embarrassed myself or them by using it as part of a security question. I asked the adviser if he could tell me from his computer records exactly what my security question should have been, as that would address my fear that some hacking activity had maliciously altered my real security question to a spurious one that wasn’t of my choice. The adviser did appear to understand my concerns but such is the nature of the checks and safeguards that protect security information of my bank’s clients, that even the adviser could not tell me exactly what my security question was or should have been, as that information was withheld even from him. This of course was not what I had expected from the helpdesk, reassuring though it was to me that my personal data was seemingly inviolate even from casual access by the bank’s helpdesk advisers.
Despairing at what I might do next, I asked the adviser, rather in the manner of a confused old man muttering to himself, whether I ought to try and reply to the security question, as requested, provide my father’s middle name, and be done with it, - no matter how hopelessly unpronounceable the name was. The helpdesk adviser’s reaction was one of enthusiastic support. “Why not,” he said, “Go for it”. I wasn’t sure if I was quite so ready to go forth as boldly as the adviser’s exhortation had implied but under the circumstances I had no option but to act on my own suggestion and put my elaborately constructed theory of a security breach to the test. Certain in my belief that I would be vindicated by the outcome of the test, I typed in my father’s middle name as required by the security system and waited with smug confidence for the expected error message that would prove my point. I waited in vain. For to my consternation, and perversely to my horror, the system accepted my father’s middle name as the correct response to the security question. In an instant I realised that everything that I had averred about the impossibility of my ever using my father’s middle name in response to a security question now seemed utterly foolish. I made a pretence of being excited that that my security problems were finally over but I was actually quite wretched. I announced with fake excitement to the helpdesk advisor that the system had accepted my security response and allowed me in. I offered my apologies for having contacted him unnecessarily for a problem that turned out not to have been a problem at all. He was of course gracious about it, - indeed delighted for me, and bid me a cheery good day as he concluded our conversation. He may well have hung up with the satisfaction of having done a good job but to me the whole encounter had been an extraordinary experience.
What had begun as a perfectly innocuous attempt at using internet banking had somehow left me pondering on the nature of life’s certainties. If a certainty of life could be as fragile as mine had proven to be, then my understanding of a certainty was seriously flawed. I can now apprehend that certainties of life are least prone to being shattered when they are based on empirical evidence or received wisdom of many generations. Regrettably, the certainty that I had assumed, and which prompted me to phone the helpdesk in some panic, was based on neither. If I had only paused to think, I would have realised that my certainty was not a certainty of my life. It was rather a certainty of my imagination: I had conjured up a certainty in my mind from nothing more than a fervent belief that I would never have contemplated using my father’s middle name as a memorable security word. On reflection, I should have been wiser than to allow myself to commit the folly of ascribing to my fervent belief the attributes of a certainty. But I had done so and had accordingly suffered a shock when the assumptions of my imagined certainty had been proven false by the evidence of my own actions carried out in reality.
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Despite having reached an age that most would regard as being quite old, I cannot say that I am always cognisant of that fact, although my awareness of my old age does return swiftly whenever I find myself beset by the aches and pains that seem to accompany the arrival of old age. However, I have always convinced myself that whilst as an old man I might be more feeble now in body, my mind remains as agile as it ever was in my youth, - as evidenced, for example, by my considerable ability to solve Soduku puzzles and my still undiminished facility to recite poems that I had learned as a schoolboy. Indeed, like some keep-fit fanatic submitting his body to tortuous exercise, I tend to subject my mind to some energetic mental exercises such as reciting the 75 times table, - which, as countless devotees of “Countdown” will no doubt vouch for, is extremely useful with the show’s numbers game. Sadly, I have discovered that even meticulous care and painstaking nurturing of one’s mental faculties is no safeguard against the mind’s susceptibility to the sporadic stupidity that the ageing process engenders. One such episode of stupidity occurred to me recently when I tried to leave an underground car park in Walthamstow. It was early morning, - about seven o’clock, and the timing of the occurrence, - the early hour, may well have had some significance for the lack of rapidity with which my mind reacted on that occasion. I offer this as an excuse because there is, I believe, a theory that holds that the human mind tends to react rather lethargically to events in the wee small hours of the morning. Indeed it is this theory apparently, that underlies the police practice of staging early morning arrests, predicated as they are on the belief that the pre-dawn lethargy of the human mind makes it less likely to be disposed to offering resistance to arresting officers. At any rate, my mind was not disposed that morning to offering any resistance to the vagaries of technology that confronted me, even though they amounted to nothing more than a malfunction of an automatic door, in an underground car park. At that time of the morning, the car park was virtually deserted, as I parked my car and walked up to the exit that led to the street above. The exit was clearly marked “automatic doors” and on approaching it, I fully expected the doors to part before me like some biblical sea before fleeing Israelites but to my surprise they remained unyielding. It was annoying and it might have been tempting to blame modern technology. However, I am not as cynical about the efficiency of modern British engineering as many people these days affect to be. I therefore attributed this system failure, perhaps somewhat charitably, not to poor engineering but to a possible cost-cutting measure instituted by a parsimonious local council, whereby the automatic functionality of the doors was switched off outside of normal working hours. Undaunted, I made every effort to open the door manually but no amount of pushing at the door was of any avail: it remained firmly shut. Somewhat disappointed, I turned round to try and find another door that I could use to let myself out and as I did so, noticed a young girl walking in my direction. To my alarm, this young girl appeared to be heading for the same door that I had just tried and found wanting. Normally, as an old man I would be wary of accosting young girls but on this occasion my sense of civic responsibility welled up in me. In a display of public-spiritedness, I assumed my most polite manner as the girl approached and announced to her that the door that she was about to use “was not working”. The girl’s immediate reaction surprised and delighted me, - because she responded to my pronouncement with the sweetest smile that I could possibly have encountered from a stranger. To my dismay however, she seemed to take no notice of my warning about the problematic door. Charmed as I was by her smile, I could not help entertaining the uncharitable thought that this girl was so full of youthful confidence that she could not be bothered with good advice that was not only well intentioned but would soon prove to be to her clear advantage. Like some wise old sage about to prove the sceptics wrong, I waited with smug expectation to see the girl make a fool of herself. But my smugness turned the next instant to acute embarrassment when I saw to my mortification that the girl, far from being thwarted by the door, had sailed right through it by the simple expedient of pulling it open rather than pushing it shut, - as I had been doing. I stood open mouthed in grudging admiration, marvelling at this young girl’s mental alertness which enabled her to make light of a situation that had confounded me and which now made me feel feeble minded. Why, like her, hadn’t I thought to pull the door when pushing it did not work? Why wasn’t I sufficiently compos mentis to cope with this most unchallenging of situations? Slowly, the realisation came upon me that that my mental faculties for all their daily exercise had not overcome the perennial problem of age related stupidity, known euphemistically as a “senior moment”.
]]>Despite being thus forewarned, I was totally unprepared for the unsolicited phone call that I received one morning and heard the dread words that announced that the caller was from my card provider and that there had been a fraudulent transaction on my card. Although I recognised this to be the opening gambit of the diabolical fraud that I had been warned of, I could scarcely believe that I was actually being ensnared by it. Like many an optimist, I had imagined that the law of averages would somehow ensure that I would be amongst the numerous who on the balance of probabilities could expect to remain untouched by this unwelcome event.
It was therefore a disappointment, that my justifiable optimism had not been rewarded. The laws of probability had clearly not worked in my favour but it was no use pondering over the vagaries of probability theory. Undeterred, I rose to the occasion and with great presence of mind informed the would-be fraudster that I was “right in the middle of something” and would he therefore call later. Congratulating myself as I put the phone down on having skilfully warded off an attempted fraud, I allowed myself a moment of triumphalism: these fraudsters would have to get up very early indeed to catch me out! But my elation did not last long and soon gave way to alarm as events began rapidly to take on a sinister turn. Having cut short the warning call that I had just received, I was keenly aware that I needed quickly to contact my card provider, to ascertain whether or not the call had been authentic. But mindful of the warning that the telephone must not be used on such occasions, to avoid being intercepted by the fraudsters, I rushed to my mobile to contact my card provider, - only to discover that someone had already placed an ominous message there, asking me to phone my card provider. This was now becoming a worryingly fiendish episode. Not only were the fraudsters lying in wait for me on my landline but they had also sealed off my only other avenue of help, - my mobile. For a moment I seriously contemplated going straight to the police but it so happened that I had a previous engagement to attend, - the computer class for senior citizens where I tutor. Reluctantly I decided that for the moment I had no option but to defer contacting my card provider until later. As events were to prove, that was the most sensible decision on my part that morning. For as I went to my local supermarket after my computer class and tried to pay for my shopping with my credit card, I found that it was no longer valid. This was an embarrassing development but it occurred to me that it could scarcely have been engineered by the fraudsters. They would have wanted to use the card, albeit unauthorisedly, but would not have sought to block it from use. Rather perplexed, I went home to phone the card company. By now the house phone, some four hours after the initial call from the people whom I had assumed to be fraudsters, should have unblocked itself and be available for normal communication. My inquiry at the card provider’s helpdesk, after the usual security related questions, brought forth an immediate explanation of the morning’s events. “We tried to contact you contact this morning, Mr. Keskar” the girl at the helpdesk informed me, “we were expecting your call, did you get our text ?”. It then transpired that my card had indeed been used for fraudulent transactions in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, of all places. In consequence, the card had been cancelled. As is normal in such circumstances, my card provider did not hold me liable for these transactions and asked me simply to await the issue of a new card.
That the prospect of being a fraud victim had been averted, was indeed a great relief. But it was at the same time curiously disappointing, that what had appeared earlier in the morning to have all the appearance of becoming a drama, should have ended in such an anticlimactic fashion. There was really no fraud after all, - at least none associated with the phone call that I had received that morning. I had not acted with great presence of mind. Rather, I had been tilting at windmills. Fired by the tales of fraud that I had been subjected to, my wild imagination had conjured up villainy where none existed. In reality the fate of being the victim of a vicious phone scam had not befallen me, - nor had I been the plucky victim who had fought back. My ego, which had begun to inflate itself with the thought of having turned the tables on some despicable fraudsters, was rudely pricked. There was ultimately nothing to boast about in what I had done, and certainly no danger of resting on my laurels after a great triumph. There remained only the realisation that I had narrowly escaped making a fool of myself, - which I certainly would have done, had I gone to the police that morning as I had intended.
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