The excitement of the day once again involved online banking confuddlement. It involved a new account we set up at the same financial instution that holds my 401K. Of course my 401K is completely separate from any other accounts at that institution. Except not…

There was some name confusion but I won’t go there in order to protect the innocent (not). The thing is that when the GG tried to log in to the account, it didn’t accept his password. In the process of changing it he had to do 2-factor auth (2-factor auth is a GOOD thing albeit annoying). But. The only phone number he was presented with (he thought) was not one he knew. He called out, “hey do you know anything about this phone number ending in [insert 4 digits here]?”

Yes. Yes I do. I started working for [big-fintech-company] in 2007. I was issued a landline. I NEVER used it. Actually that’s not totally true. In the early days I occasionally used it to contact company tech support. Other than that it was used for TWO purposes:

1) Our telephone numbers were very close to the numbers used by the local court system so we would fairly frequently get calls from people asking about their court dates or other issues. I was always politely but quickly dismissive. Sorry, I can’t help you [terse explanation]. W1.5 (over the wall from me) was uber polite and once or twice people tried to make THEIR problem (wrong number) HIS problem.

2) Cubelandia denizens would call each other if we detected that Brooosie was haaaanging around in someone’s cube taaaaallllking in order to rescue the “victim”. I try to be kind to weird people so I tried to politely listen to Brooooosie’s “stuff” when he cornered me. He is a weird guy but a lot of that is because he has a genetic disorder that wasn’t discovered until he was in his late 20s. He was nice, kind, and not creepy, at least not to me, as an old mother by the time I hired on. A younger, more naive woman may have been freaked out but I’ve known lots of weird harmless people in my life and I don’t think I have EVER been naive except maybe about boyfriends. Still. I was always happy when someone “rescued” me from Broooosie’s little rants.

So somehow my company probably ported my work phone number that I never really used over into my 401K account. And somehow it got attached to our other account(s) there.

Problem? I have been a permanent telecommuter since you-know-when. i dunno what’s going on at our old building now but all of our old landline phones are definitely long gone.

In the end, faced with 2-factor auth choices again, we discovered a small link under the “bad” phone number. “more options” or something. Clicking on that, voila, there were our iPhone numbers. All is well now.

Other than that, it has been a fugly day featuring a couple hours of snow (that more or less melted) and high enough winds that “stuff” was falling on the roof. Nothing worrying. In other words, a fairly typical winter day.

P.S. I didn’t steal the pic from the internet. It was an actual (hacked) sign on The Planet Ann Arbor back in 2011.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2024 at 7:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.