I talk about technology a lot and how much it influences our lives.
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I rely on technology a lot to run my week to week activities, and I have to admit I am fairly lost without it.
On the weekend relying on technology came back to bite me, when the CUSCAL server went down.
I now know that CUSCAL is the entity that makes my bank cards work in teller machines and eftpos, because they own the system that runs some of them.
Anyone holding an account with some credit unions and mutual banks were not able to get at their money over this past weekend, leaving a lot of people stranded with no cash during the beginning of the Christmas shopping rush.
An expensive exercise I’m sure and customers didn’t receive any warnings.
ATM terminals were withdrawing cash from accounts but failing to dispense it, and customers now face a nervous wait for their missing money to be returned.
There were even reports on Twitter about a whole shopping centre at Nowra being unable to take payments in any other way but cash.
I got caught out, and I am rarely without a back-up plan for most situations because that’s what mums do, right? A series of events that morning (ok, so they may have been shopping events), left my wallet empty and it was necessary to whip out the card to pay for things that were actually essential.
It was very embarrassing to have my card knocked back and even more so when I told the cashier I’ll just go to the teller machine.
Only to return empty handed, where the cashier told me that the last person’s card worked just fine, so how about we try yours again? Afterwards and to my horror on checking my banking with my smartphone (yes I grabbed the technology out again), my account had been debited every time I tried to use it.
That’ll teach me, and it should really be a lesson for everyone else too.
With so many people relying on the Internet for everything, we are going to have to expect crashes and have a back-up plan.
You might remember recently the online shopping event called Click Frenzy that crashed as a result of so many people wanting to shop at once, and public outrage followed from thousands of disappointed shoppers. Online shopping just cannot be relied on this Christmas to come through on time as the Click Frenzy shopping fail illustrated in mass proportions.
It is possible that the world could grind to a halt if the Internet goes down. I know my little world was put on pause for a day.
Alright that is a little dramatic, but I couldn’t buy milk for my coffee people! That in itself should be against the law, right? You could probably call this a first world problem and I should consider myself lucky I have money to buy coffee, which goes without saying.
So, what have I have learnt due to this past weekend shopping flop of mine? Never leave town without getting cash out first.
Keep a spare $20 stashed in the car.
Don’t spend that spare twenty on donuts and not replace it, and most important of all I was better off keeping my money in a sock.