Net benefit? Not everyone wants to bank online
When the first rumblings were sounded about the closure of Westpac branches I whipped into a suburban branch to pay some money off a credit card and was waiting in a queue for my turn at the counter.
The woman behind me in the line accidentally dropped a bundle of Apirana Ngatas ($50 notes) on the floor, which moved me to utter the cliche: ‘‘Throwing it around, are you?’’
She obliged by laughing at the old joke and, after retrieving her notes from the carpet, we began chatting. She’d just had a lunch with the family to celebrate a milestone and was pleased because the whanau had agreed that an upcoming wedding she was organising was going to be held on the marae.
Much simpler and cheaper, she said, while I chimed in to tell her I had remembered my brother, the vicar, once mentioning that weddings can take place at the back of the church after the Sunday service, in the manner of baptisms.
As we slowly moved up in the queue, the talk turned to gardening as she confessed she was in the habit of talking to her plants, paying them compliments on their progress and generally egging them on.
‘‘The only trouble is they never talk back to me,’’ she regretted.
There seemed to be two complicated transactions going on at the only counters operating while the queue grew and was nearly out the door. Not that this prompted all hands to the pump as we waited and shifted our weight from left leg to right and exchanged our pleasantries.
By the time it was my turn to approach the bench, your honour, the teller apologised for the wait, to which I replied that I knew it wasn’t her fault. She glanced at my credit card bill and told me I could pay it online and could have saved time waiting in a queue. That was all very well, I said, but then I wouldn’t have got to shoot the breeze with my new queue buddy and feel good about the joy of meeting strangers. And besides not everyone wants to go online to pay bills.
The teller had merely trotted out the company line but the feeling was implicit that clients who opted for face time with a teller were a bloody nuisance. Call me a public menace but there’s still a few of us who refuse to be put under internet house arrest where we have to order and transact our lives totally online. We can be educated online, have sex online, order hitmen on line … In my bleaker moments I envisage a time when we will be able to order our own demises and send digital messages to our funeral directors informing them we have kicked the bucket, and could we order a coffin please.
I feel really concerned and sorry for the elderly in small towns who Westpac has turned its backs on by shutting up shop. It’s all very well offering digital education but many of these old dogs simply cannot learn new tricks. And why should they when they have spent their entire lives knowing the value of cash in hand, and have every right to expect a readily available money temple from which to extract their cash.
To avoid the humiliation of learning how to bank online, I predict many elderly people will ask a favour, or appoint proxy, to get their money for them when travelling further afield. I’m sure this scenario has already occurred in the minds of opportunistic predators already buddying up to the elderly to ‘help’ them out with their monetary needs – perhaps even steering them to a ‘secret’ hiding place to stash their wads.
Elderly residents in isolated rural areas fearing a home invasion may feel compelled to display signs on their gates declaring ‘No cash on premises’. (Incidentally, the new tough dog laws compelling owners of high-risk canines to keep their mutts in a fenced-in area, and display dog-free access entrance signs, is an absolute gift to burglars.)
To get back to the offer of digital education, let’s look to the future of an increased ageing population suffering from any one of the many kinds of dazzling dementias waiting in store for us. You can bet your bottom dollar that remembering the various passwords, or even being able to tap them out on a keyboard, will be a bridge too far for diminished minds and faded memories.
Low-paid caregivers will not only have to offer physical help but provide digital assistance as they order groceries and move money around online for their bewildered clients. Part of retirement savings may have to be put aside to go toward the hiring of a digital nurse to assist with the increasingly vast online requirements forced upon the population.
Not everyone will be able to afford or have the status of a robot to look after their needs in the embattled twilight years. As the cancelling out of the human touch escalates, faulty humans, deemed too costly to be fixed, will be carted out and left in front of their houses like malfunctioning whiteware waiting for the council to pick it up and take it to the dump.
I am constantly amazed when people who I once considered sane pull out the latest phone and wax lyrical about its fabulous features. Good manners oblige me to peer myopically at their apps, rather than their abs, while listening to the staggering sums of cash they have parted with to purchase the latest status symbol.
Like my friend in the bank queue who talks to the flowers and they fail to reply, we are becoming as silent as her plants and losing our ability to hold decent conversations, preferring instead to point and stare mutely at screens for communication.
The biggest social engineering con of all time is being visited upon us and we appear to be rushing toward it in a deep embrace till our epitaph will read – ‘Here lies the last remains of the bodies and minds of free range humans before they walked into the net and disappeared forever’.
Low-paid caregivers will not only have to offer physical help but provide digital assistance as they order groceries and move money around online for their bewildered clients.