enough factors for a “fuck this”

i get it…

…nobody wants their account hacked.

we had an incident a few years ago at the shop. we started getting collection calls about our mobile bill. our COMPANY mobile bill. but here’s the thing – we don’t HAVE company phones. we don’t. shit, the family that owns the joint can’t even agree on who to use as mobile providers, so they’re actually on two different ones. but somebody, somehow, had started up a mobile account in our company name, with our shop as the billing address, even though they were hundreds of miles away (houston) and set up SIX lines on the account (four iPhone, two iPad – this was long before the apple watch was a thing or i guarantee that would have been there, too) and just charged all devices to the account under the e-z payment plan…and left us with the bill.

so we had all services cut off, chatted with their fraud department, and they used “find my iPhone” to find them all and prosecute the folks who’s hot little hands they were in.

but i don’t think today’s headache would have handled that.

my debit card i pay my bills with expires this month. so all the places it’s saved need to be updated. some of them are easy – you log in and get a little notice that your card expires this month, there’s a link, and you click it and change the date and CCV. the number stayed the same. easy breezy.

than there were the others where you can’t find WHERE the fuck the info is saved. and you use their search function with “update payment info” and it shows a link that doesn’t work. one of the sites had apparently changed payment processing companies so you had to go through THREE FACTOR authentication whereby i had to log in, then click all the pics with stoplights, then all the pics with chimneys, then put in the code they emailed me (after about a fifteen minute delay) then put in the code they texted me, THEN i could update the card so they could get paid.

and don’t get me started on gmail – while my phone lets me into all my accounts (i have three with them) without issue, if i try it through my laptop i have to log in to youtube on my phone (?!?) to show i’m me, which is extra odd since i rarely use youtube (relax – my kid’s viewing of the app for twenty hours a day, quite literally, makes up for my slacking on that one).

so why the fuck did all my accounts get like this? it’s funny – i pay my bills on or around the twenty-fifth, and a lot of them have this card saved, so i honestly spent the time to change this because i’m used to being able to pay bills pretty quickly and wanted it to be smooth when the time came – who knew it would take three times the work to do it in advance? and some of them i couldn’t update because after i put the card in the only option was “PAY BILL NOW” instead of just saving the payment info!

“convenience” my ass!