Why . . . ?

Do you remember when we used to have to line up at the bank to do our banking?  When we used to write out a cheque and post it off to pay our bills?  Now there is 'Internet Banking'.  Well, there's internet everything else so there may as well be internet banking.

Remember when we didn't have credit cards?  When there was absolutely no such thing?  You saw something you wanted and you saved up your money by any method you fancied and when you had enough, you went and bought the thing you wanted.  Now that internet shopping has created the need for internet banking, the credit card is in everyone's pocket and is a seemingly essential part of everyday life.

I broke my own rule of alternate gardening days this morning and spent a couple of hours pulling out nut grass.  Such an easy, mindless thing to do - and just as well because it is a job in my garden that will NEVER END.  All the learned experts tell me, once nut grass is in your garden, it will be always in your garden.  I'd like to think that if I pulled it all out six million times, that by the time six million and one times came around, there would be nothing left to pull out.  That's my theory and I'll have to go with it, otherwise the reality will get me down too much.

After my stint with the nut grass, I made a coffee and sat down at the computer to do my 'Internet Banking'.  Paid the Council rates, paid the Community Association levies, transferred money to my credit card and checked the balance - WHAT THE . . . . !!!!!!!!

A quick check of the transactions on my credit card shows me that this very morning, two amounts, both in excess of $1600, were added to my credit card.  A quick call to the bank and the young chap there tells me the names of the two companies that now have the money, neither of which I have ever heard of in my life, let alone spent money at.  He says the purchases have yet to be authorised and that if, by some chance, it is a case of wrong digits or glitch of some sort, then the amounts will indeed disappear off my account.  Somehow, I feel that is unlikely.  Some nasty person has taken advantage of the fact that I have a credit card.  Not content to have their own credit card, they would prefer to defraud ordinary people out of extraordinary amounts of money.

I was most upset, more cranky than anything.  How dare they!

My next job was to go to the supermarket.  The pantry was looking bare and the fridge not much better.  My stint in the garden this morning served the purpose of making my busted ankle a little more dodgy, to the point where, when I got to the shop and managed to score a shopping trolley that went every which way but straight, I had the greatest difficulty in walking at all.  The ankle just refused to be even slightly flexible and I hobbled my way up the aisles, fighting the rotten trolley and feeling more miserable by the minute until by the time I made it to the dairy section, I had found an old raggedy tissue in my handbag which I surreptitiously used to mop up the tears that insisted on seeping out of my eyes.

Would it be easy to go back to not having these trappings of the 21st century?  Could we survive without our credit cards?  And our internet banking?  We could certainly survive without the scoundrels who have no conscience and think nothing of making our lives miserable.