Wild Card Entry!!!

I recently bought a car and was so excited that I did it all by myself. There is a lengthy process of signing papers and filling stuff out after you’ve been approved for a loan as I was. I didn’t pay cash so I decided to go through my credit union in hopes of getting a lower interest rate. During the final process of filling out all the paperwork they asked me if I wanted to set up a direct withdrawal from my bank account for my car payment. This is what I had wanted to do from the beginning so I said yes, and gave them all my bank account information. They told me that it wouldn’t be taken out this month but it would be starting the following month. So we finish up with everything and I drive away from the dealership in my new car feeling very satisfied and proud of myself for having used some of the rhetoric I learned in a previous class to negotiate a more reasonable price on the car.

I am very aware that I just did a grown up thing by buying a car and will have monthly payments to make to my bank. Every 5th of the month for the following 36 months I am to have a certain amount of money in my “car fund,” a special account I created to make my car payments. This is scary for me, but something that I am prepared to do. I understand that if the money is not in that account that my financial future will be greatly affected.

As the 5th of the following month comes around I am eager for my first payment to get withdrawn. I have put the money in the “car fund” account many days before the payment is to be taken out. When the day comes I check my online banking in the morning, evening, and before I go to bed, and nothing. They next day I check online again and still nothing has been taken out. I then wait another day and when nothing happens yet again I start to panic. I think to myself, “this is supposed to be easy, I put money into the account and they take it out, and I can transfer and manage everything through my computer.” Then I think maybe I should have done it the old fashioned way, by just writing a check and sending it via mail. I mean that way would have been way less stressful at this point. So I call the bank and tell them that I am looking at my online banking account and that money that is supposed to be taken out of my one of my account’s has not been taken out yet. They do some research and let me know that my online banking account has been frozen because someone tried to access it one too many times with an incorrect password and so that froze my entire account. I’m thinking “o geeze,” just my luck. Once I get my account unfrozen and things taken care of, the next day I check and the money has been taken out.

In regards to this assignment I am thinking that if I had done it the old fashioned way then I could have been spared this very stressful and confusing situation. If someone hadn’t of tried to hack into my online banking account through a computer then my account would have never of frozen and things would have been fine. But this is a risk that you take when you do things over the computer and next time I will be better prepared to manage a situation like this.

In our textbook it talks about how we can resist Technopoly, however I think this is a very difficult thing to do. When something is so prevalent it’s hard to stop it from progressing. In the above example I just gave, even though I had trouble with my first car payment, that doesn’t mean that I am going to stop managing my accounts online or using a direct withdrawal system. When I weigh the benefits of using a computer against the cons, the computer wins. This is how you know that you have a very powerful enemy, when it wins regardless of mistakes in the system, mistakes that can be very detrimental, such as mine that could have affected my credit. I would have to say that this is something Postman didn’t discuss, how powerful the computer, internet, and technology in general actually are. This makes being a resistance fighter all that more challenging and a difficult attribute to build within people.