Personal financial career begins
I had a flashback to one of those interminable high school literature classes this afternoon. No Shakie here; we were reading fine, local, Canadian short stories by Stephen Leacock. I should add that my high school had a love/hate relationship with some of his other works, so the inclusion of My Financial Career made perfect sense.
Today, my youngest child has of the appropriate age to take on responsibility for money. My money. Some of it. We made sure that he had sufficient documentation of his personal identity, since my presence doesn’t count in the world of personal banking. I did have to provide my bona fides, of course. Shall we begin?
The financial counselor (banks no longer employ tellers) assured us that all would soon be in order, despite the missing magical number provided by the federal tax agency. We could phone that one in later, although leaving the information in the personal voicemail box would not be acceptable. Security at all costs.
How long had we lived at our current address? Him or me? Was there an apartment number? No, we just refer to them as bedrooms, and rank them in order of neatness. Telephone number? Oh no, not someone else to call me at suppertime. Electronic address? I appreciated the assurance that banks never actually email you, that role reserved for phishing messages. Would my son want a chequing or a saving (or both) account? The “or both” option sounds right for the price.
Next in the script was the choice of a personal identification number: with four digits, you only have 9999 possible combinations. Up the mask to five digits and things ground to a halt. Two or three timeouts on the machine and a choice was finally made. Money now changed hands (my money becomes their money so easily). And we were done. The ATM card will be ready in a few days, complete with embedded chip technology (why can’t I have that, since it’s really my money at risk here?). Meanwhile, my son is now a brick in the wall of the economic world.
