My inattentiveness or corporate inefficiency?

A message to Park State Bank in Duluth MN

Park State asks for resetting passwords too frequently.  I don’t remember ever having to do it with Pioneer National Bank (which was bought by Park State).

I messed up on making one of these required updates this week and was locked out of my account.  I went to the Mt. Royal branch and Therese helped me get my iPhone and iPad accessing  my account.

When I returned home, I successfully accessed my account.  However, I could not access my account with a Mac Book Pro (10.9.5) or a MacBook Air (10.14), both of which I have been using for some time to access my account.

I called the Lincoln Park office and was reminded that my password was the last four digits of my Social Security number.

I made the update on all four devices, but I still cannot access my accounts with the laptops.  I obviously can access my account my iPad.

Has Jack Henry made some errors in its latest update to Park State Bank?  If so, it is  ironic!  I  moved my account several years ago from Republic Bank to Pioneer National Bank because Jack Henry did not work properly with my Consumer Cellular phone.  In fact, Jack Henry did not even list Consumer Cellular in its list of providers.  Consumer Cellular has full page ads in the AARP magazine!  That phone worked fine with Pioneer’s provider.

P.S. the characters on this page are very tiny and I found no way to enlarge them.   4pt is very hard on senior eyes!

End of edited message to Park Bank.  I corrected all my typos that I didn’t spot because of the tiny print.  I also found that Park Bank doesn’t want recognize my iPad as it did yesterday.

So, we’ll have to go to the main office sometime in the coming week to walk through this will all of our devices.

Spam français

For francophones, here is the text of an email I received this past week; the email gives itself away as spam.  For francophobes, an explanation follows.

Chér(e) client(e)

Nous vous informons que votre compte arrive a expiration dans mois 48 heures, il est impérratif d'effecteur une vérfication des vos informations prérsent, sans quoi votre compte sera détruit. Cliquez simplement sur le lien ci-dessous et ouvrer une session ' l'aide de votre Apple ID et de votre mot de passe.

Vérfiez maintenat.

Merci, L'assistance a la clientéle Apple

This email is filled with misspellings: dropped letters and unaccented letters.  It is misdirected; what makes the sender think that I have a French Apple account.  And the dead give-away that too many gullible people miss, one never acts on a strange email that asks for the recipient's password (mot de passe).

Good service still exists

If I rant about all the screw-ups in corporate America, I should also praise good service when I encounter it.

I have a blog in mind on how Apple giveth and Apple taketh away. One of the taketh aways was how PDF files download from websites. I tried downloading my statement from Ameritrade with Safari. I could get a window with the statement, but I could find no way to save it as a file. I gave up and used Firefox and had my statement downloaded in seconds. I sent feedback Ameritrade and received and answer in a day. One now has to hold down a key while clicking on the link to a downloadable file. Let's see, I wonder how quickly I would have been able to unbury a similar answer in Apple's forums.

I have some bizarre clues for my passwords, and sometimes I can't figure out what I meant. When I tried to get my US Funds statement I couldn't figure out my password. This particular site doesn't give you many chances to try again. Even when asked the security question, I couldn't answer it correctly, probably because I used a different variation on the spelling of the answer. Poof! Please call a representative.

I did that and I did have a wait with some Mozart. But when I got a representative he asked how the weather was here and mentioned that his daughter had visited Two Harbors recently. He quickly gave me a temp password and I gave it another go. Then I couldn't change it because I couldn't find anyplace to do so. Another call but with no wait time and with the same representative. He pointed out the pull-down menu that linked to password maintenance (it was kind of obscured by a poorly-chosen color overlay).

Both of these incidents are cases where effectiveness is more important than efficiency. Should these representatives' performance be measured by how many customers they serve a day (efficiency) or by how courteously they give satisfactory solutions (effectiveness)? I'll take effectiveness any day, even if I have to wait for it.