Neither notes nor coins and no winning Lotto number

This week’s Mediahuis/INM Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

Earlier this month I wrote a column about how difficult it can be to navigate across some websites. I was pleasantly surprised with the feedback I received. 

A millennial complimented  me on the piece, suggesting ‘we turn off the machine and go back to the 1990s’. He was of course referring to our modern technology.

Last weekend I paid my television licence on line. Older people will remember the rigmarole and the time it took to renew all types of annual payments.

 

I’m scared of becoming a victim of a scam and they are growing more sophisticated by the day. On a positive note, a work colleague showed me how I can freeze my Visa card using my mobile phone. Earlier in the day I had panicked having lost my card. I phoned the bank and cancelled the card. It meant I had to go through all the nuisance and inconvenience of obtaining a new one. And that was before I found the old one under my desk.

Like everything in life there are the swings and the roundabouts with modern technology.

But every day I’m learning the importance of being on my guard and having Plan B up my sleeve.

A friend of mine arrived back in Dublin after a day’s trip to Wexford, where she was delivering a parcel to someone.

It had been a hectic day for her and she had little or no time to sit down to eat a meal. 

On arriving back in the city centre she went into a shop to buy food and some other provisions, and while she was at the counter also bought a Lotto ticket. 

She packed her purchases, tapped the card machine, the machine did not accept the card so she was asked to insert the card. No luck. She tried a second time, punching in the four digits she thought was her pass code. Again out of luck. 

A queue began to form behind her. She is a retiring, almost shy person, which meant she was now in panic mode. She aborted the card transaction and went to pay with cash to discover she had none.

It meant she had to unpack all that she had bought and was now feeling greatly embarrassed. The shop assistant was most helpful. In the confusion she forgot to return the Lotto ticket. When reminded of it she went looking for it in her purse and as she was searching, the kind assistant nodded and told her to forget about it and keep it as a gift from the shop.

She left the premises, exhausted, greatly embarrassed and traumatised too.

She went searching again in her purse, this time for her Travel Pass. ‘Michael, what would I have done had I not got that with me,’ she said.

All our modern technology is great, debit cards, credit cards, ATMs are brilliant inventions. But you must always have a Plan B, which means never go anywhere without having old fashioned legal tender notes and coins in your pocket, wallet, purse, or wherever is the safest place to keep your cash.

And not one winning number on that Lotto ticket. That’s life.