Well, let me tell you how you can help...

WHEN a company’s slogan is “how can we help you?”, it’s natural to assume that one is in safe hands.

My story isn’t new and neither are my gripes with a bank that’s served me very well over the past 30 years – until this week.

If you haven’t come to blows with the latest Big Brother fiasco that is “verifying that you do, in fact exist, or else”, then your good karma tank is full. But if, like me, you’ve been hit by the faceless monolith of corporate ineptitude that represents modern business, you have my sympathy.

For some reason, the world is highly suspicious of itself these days, with companies and governments telling us that we’re surrounded by hackers, fraudsters and criminals poised to flush our bank accounts, tell us tall stories and generally make us miserable.

I’m not sure if that’s really the case, but I do suspect that somewhere along the line, we lost our grip on basic humanity and good manners when we began relying on technology to run our lives.

A few months ago, First National Bank sent me a text message to let me know that in order to continue paying it bank charges and using my account, I’d need to follow the government-sanctioned rules by verifying that I was who I claimed to be when I first opened my account, oh, moons and moons ago.

We sigh, we gnash our teeth, we do as we are told. Except, because we’ve lost our grip on humanity and good manners, doing as we are told isn’t as easy as print, lick and pop it in the post.

Despite several e-mails between me (the real me, honestly) and an array of FNB employees, some nameless, all faceless, it appeared impossible to verify that I was me for a number of reasons.

Eventually, thanks to a property agreement and re-scanned identity document (the same one, scanned with the same scanner and no different to the first), FNB told me that I was safe, did exist and that all documents were in order.

Except that, in a world supposedly overrun by criminals and people posing as me, the story continues.

In a farcical exchange of text messages that felt like a grim countdown, FNB forgot that it had told me that I did exist and that my documents were in order; instead, it gave me first 20 days, and then 10, to submit the same documents which I had already submitted six (I counted) times, or have my account frozen.

When my grandfather did business, he had a bank manager with a face and a name and all his business was conducted at a desk, on a Saturday morning, with a few chuckles and a cup of tea.

Perhaps, if things were a little more go-slow and simple, as they were then, FNB wouldn’t be preventing me from buying bread and milk today because my money has been frozen in a lockdown scenario reminiscent of a thriller flick, in which water runs out, governments collapse and nobody says “how can we help you?” anymore.