Username: Mattress / PW: Under

I am utterly paranoid about modern banking.

Zero balance? SOMEONE GOT THE NUMBERS

Every so often you think “what’s something I can start with enthusiasm and determination, only to abandon a few months later?” Something to make you feel productive, on-top-of-things. Ah: a digital budget! There should be lots of keen shiny apps for that. Something to track unwanted subscriptions, like monthly charges for a digital budget application.

Now, I know what our recurring expenses are, and they float in my head like stars in a constellation (oh look, up there, Mortgage, in its usual fixed place; ah, there’s Food, rising)  — but specifics would be nice. I want pie charts and bar graphs, so I can see how much I spent on pie or at the bar.

The budget program I chose was slick and attractive. Step one:  It needed to know how much lucre I had in the bank, of course, so it could warn me that I was running on fumes when I put down the card for a big-ticket item like a TV or a pound of lean ground beef. It asked for my bank password and account numbers.

I stared at the window on the screen, the cursor blinking expectantly in the text field.

I closed the program, uninstalled it, zero’d out my hard drive, removed the hard drive, smashed with a hammer, ran it through a bandsaw a few times, then buried the pieces in six locations ten miles apart.

Then I changed my bank passwords from 123456 to 1234567. Can’t be too safe.

Yes, I am so paranoid about banking account numbers and passwords that the mere act of asking for them made me back out. Once I had to send bank account and routing information to daughter, and I put it in an encrypted pdf, with instructions about the password:

“Original name of second dog with first syllable in Latin + number of windows in your bedroom + number of city blocks to high school + first hamster name + birthday (month, day) X # of hamsters owned

DAD JUST TEXT IT PLEASE

NO. SOMEONE WILL STEAL THE NUMBERS AND DRAIN THE ACCOUNTS AND I WILL HAVE TO WEAR A BARREL HELD IN PLACE BY TWO THREADBARE SUSPENDERS.

It has been a while since extreme poverty was characterized by barrel-wearing, but I am a traditionalist in these things. (I ended up giving to her over the phone, in a low whisper.)

I had to wire her money in Brazil once, and I was convinced the numbers would be stolen. After all, I’d mailed her a package, and it was opened in the post office in her town, emptied,  then rerouted to South Korea, where it sat for two months. It’s unfair,  but I believe that if I ever fly to Brazil, the pilot will lift my wallet as I pass out the airplane door.

Anyway.  The service that connected the app to the bank was, I learned, perfectly safe. It has 14 levels of 256-bit encryption or something. It was certified by everyone who certifies these things, although who certifies the certifiers I do not know. Each transaction was translated to Esperanto to ensure no one understands it. Your account number was the equivalent of some numbers on a Post-It note that went through the laundry, was encased in plutonium, sealed in a ceramic cask, buried in a decommissioned mine,  and covered with concrete. Makes the Oak Island Treasure pit look like a box of animal crackers.

You sign up, and a week later you see a headline: BARREL FUTURES SURGE AFTER MAJOR BREACH AT BANK TRANSFER COMPANY -  all because someone left a backdoor open. Literally, I mean: someone came in the server farm by the rear entrance and took the computers. All your numbers end up on the dreaded Dark Web because you trusted your most intimate financial details with a company called Kippybingo. How could that happen? They were certified secure by Plagooba!

So, no. I will not connect my bank to your service. I feel the same way about that as Lutherans felt when ministers started asking everyone to turn around and greet a neighbor with a hand-shake. Oh, we did it, but we knew where this would lead. Hugs. I’m here for the word of God, not to touch people. How about we just leave it at a nod.

That’s how I feel about the budgeting app and my bank accounts: they can nod to each other in the basement after the service, and while that does indicate a relationship, it doesn’t mean either is going to drop by some night for cards.