Retirement (or Last of the Summer Wine)

Hello Helen, Yes absolutely. As well as following the procedures. Form filling is awful for many folk. Ask the pensioners who try to fill in pension credit requests, leave alone sifting through who owns this & so on. It would be like me trying to hang wallpapers, or fix someone's tele!

Hello, ooow, hello. Business shim tactics. Business institutions, banks especially, use shim tactics, which is almost a wrapped up in tinsel deceit. Those with online banking will be familiar with emails in your inbox, "Our revised terms & conditions". Often, such will introduce a hidden deliberate error, which later they will correct, but over-correct so able to introduce a new condition which goes unnoticed until a crunch time comes along. There's nothing new in this. Even in my morning Genisis reading, Laban, deceives Jacob over a period of twenty years using the same tactics. There's not a lot we can do about it, because they counter evidence that would need forty barristers to argue over. Have a good day all.

Yes Philip. Banks can be rather confusing. Did you notice they all wear white coats ?

I think that here, most of them are wearing PJs because they're all working from home.

What exactly is this "online banking" thing? No scams with good old cash !!

Alas, if you don't use the internet you can't access the better accounts. So many services (more than banking) are very hard to access any other way.

Agreed. I still use cash wherever possible. The government would love to get rid of cash altogether. Why? Big Brother (I suppose these days I should say Big Sibling, but it don't have that ring). Every time you use a plastic card or an online transaction, there's a record on computer: your name, where you bought something, exactly what time to the second, who served you, what you bought, your bank account details, your address, how many moles (if any) you have on your left buttock... and so on ad nauseam. Now, cash. I can go up the Smoke on the train, buy something with cash, and nobody is any the wiser. Okay, there might be an image of a bloke in a shop on the CCTV. But I could be Jim smith, Micky Spillane, Aloysius Hancock, Oliver Thistlethwaite... maybe I should start wearing a hood, a baseball cap, or a woolly hat pulled down to obscure the face as much as possible. Any argument (or yet another government con) that scrapping cash would stop money laundering is a non-starter. Remember when they brought out the new plasticated mickey-mouse bank notes? "They will be [virtually] impossible to forge", we were told. Fake notes were in circulation almost as soon as the official ones were launched.

I know what you mean Slim, about keeping cash as it's important and I even understand the desire to use cash to be anonymous but that's a separate issue to online banking. As for travelling using cash rather than phone or card, the system probably flags people who use cash! Especially if they're covering their face. As for tracking people, it's fairly possible to do that now if they're looking for you but they're almost swamped with data. They don't routinely track everybody because it would be wasted effort. The data is out there but in a million different pits. Even your GP records aren't automatically connected to the NHS, and different hospitals don't necessarily have access to the records of each other. If you've ever had to see two different specialists, even for the same condition, they've often no idea what the other specialist knows. Businesses know most about people from what we search and buy but even that can be avoided. I use a browser with almost everything turned off. Google has most access to my movements but for some weird reason still thinks that I'm interested in cats and dogs and American football. It may know that I'm interested in Coventry but it doesn't seem to consider it a fact worth storing. It correctly identified that I'm interested in buying from small, medium and large outlets but that is a bit like concluding that I breathe and go to the toilet. So yes, if you ever commit a very serious crime the system might be able to track some people easier than others but...