I’m a big fan of online banking. Couldn’t live without it. 99.9999% of the time it works perfectly and causes no problems. Until, of course, today when I went to pay bills and ended up on the phone with Skippy the Wonder Kid in online banking support because the site refused to accept my normal username and password and was behaving otherwise oddly.
Not being completely sure if I had become the victim of a URL redirect weapon or if the recent cache, history and password clear out that I had done in Firefox was causing the problem, I was more than a little spooked.
Very, very long story short – after nearly two hours of messing around, Skippy’s supervisor was put on the line. For whatever reason, she had me uninstall my Flash player (for which, you need to download a Flash player uninstaller from Adobe – don’t even get me started on THAT one…) and upgrading to the latest version … and setting all of my username, password, site key and account nicknames up all over again (thank goodness all my bill pay payees hadn’t been wiped, nor any other access to accounts, etc.) lo and behold, I once again had full access and could once again start sending out money.
Ms. Supervisor and I were not sure whether it was something that Skippy did, or the upgrade to Flash 10, a combination of both or neither one that did the trick.
I know one thing – I’m not at all sure I’m completely comfortable in a world where access to my bank accounts is dependent on which version of Adobe Flash Player I’m running.
If online banking weren’t just so darned handy!
