Don't you just love Christmas shopping? It's so relaxing and easy. You can even bypass the hassle of reaching over and grabbing your card holder (I don’t do wallets) from the table, because with your details saved on the website you needn’t tap in the numbers. I remember the early part of the century where I had to look at my card, carefully finger my way through the digits to make sure the they were all correct and matched up with my orginal bank details. God the inconvenience! Such barbaric times! Then after all the number tapping, you had to go through an endless amount of confirmation pages. Confirming. Confirming the confirmation. Confirm that your confirmation confirm was authentic. Then just to be sure, confirm that you can confirm. Do you know the meaning of confirm? Can you spell confirm? Can you confirm these random swirly numbers and digits? No? Well try these ones instead. (Maybe if you make the fucking things legible, then I can confirm). Are you sure you want to confirm the confirmation of the the confirmation, verified my the squiggly letter code, of the confirmation? If not, then we urge you to re-assess your last couple of hours. Of course I want to fucking confirm!
But now, how we have progressed. A long way we have come. I can now buy with one click! One click. This is not new, it's been around a while, and for that I am glad. I would hate to think that something so practical and efficient should be held away from the public, so that it couldn't shape the minds of children to come. Makes me want to make babies, just so I can share with them the joy. I couldn’t give two Christmas-dinner-smelling shits whether it's too easy to spend money on things you don’t actually want, or if it's easier for hackers to take your personal bank details. I have made that choice to use the function and have my details saved for one glorious reason. Convenience. And when people start questioning such ease, it angers me that people are regressing to a baser for of atavism. We live in a a world where risk comes in many forms, and to exaggerate the fear of online security is only another way of spiking doubt into apprehensive minds. We all know. How hard has it been for us to encourage our elders to shop online, only to be confronted by stupid horror stories of how a hacker took your details to buy fat-people body suits. Or something like that.
And for those that claim that it encourages needless spending and purchasing mistakes? Well that’s just silliness. If you ened up spending all your money, or buying things you don’t want, you only have yourself to blame. I have no sympathy for people that rely on convenience to the point of debilitation. Just imagine a sales assistant repeating to you constantly if you were sure you wanted to buy a thing you wanted. You'd end up braining them really hard. I mean, it would be sickly satisfying stuff; easily done in a DIY shop. But even if you were in a soft toy shop, you'd find a way. You'd eventually shove the stuffed meerkat teddy, you wanted to buy for your two-year-old nephew, down the person's throat so hard that as the person turned blue and slowly died with bloodshot eyes of terrified bewilderment, the meerkat's head would diligently poke up out of the dead persons mouth, asking:
“Are you sure you wanted to do that?”
Human laziness has been such a fertile ground for creativity, born out of our need for convenience. It's how we are evolved, there's no need fighting it. That’s why we have corner shops (aptly named convenience stores in America!) Oh wait. Come to think of it, corner shops are dangerous. They breed angry, capped youths with dirty trainers and dirtier mouths who shout out racial slurs at old ladies. We should start closing them down. Trains too! They're dangerous. They kill teenage youths and old ladies alike. The former because of their daring stupidity playing chicken on the tracks with their mates, and the latter because of their slowness in getting away from the tracks when the barriers come down. End result – two stratas of society carelessly culled. We should have far fewer trains. One-click internet shopping! Your stolen money could be used to fund the next series of The Inside Lives of Britain's Masterchef Quarterfinalists. We really should limit that.
However, with every advance there is always a setback, and trust the banks to find a way to bring it all down. I recently had forced upon me a security number generating pad from my bank that you need now to access your online bank details. I always thought online banking was a nice step forward for banks. A good move. It takes a lot for me to say that, because I hate banks with a passion that equals the hatred of penguins towards BBC wildlife cameramen who get in their way. And then what do the banks do? They take all the convenience away, in the re-upholstered and hideous new form of the the word “security”. I mean it's all too easy to rip on banks. They're evil, we all know that, well at least I know that. I see the truth you see. It's an uncanny gift of mine, bestowed upon me through my hatred of the indirectness and obfuscation of banks. But the banks new move makes the machinations of Mao merely misguided mischief. Instead of simply accessing and easily performing banking transactions, now I have a new set of numbers and confirmations to contend with, ones that don’t even result in the payoff of things bought. The only thing that is bought is another slice of misery. HSBC - Horrible Shitty Banking Crap . I would rather have convenience at the risk of having all my money stolen, than have to carry cards, keys, numbers and patience, all in the name of security.
