Last night I was talking to my brother. He lives right outside of Chicago and works in a large bank. So far brother has been sitting on the fence about Y2k. He has started preparing.

He said his bank has a 12 page pamplet concerning Y2k. This is to be given out to those wanting to withdraw or have questions about Y2k. Brother said he read the pamplet and it is all "glooblygook". In other words, a whole of of writing that says nothing, promises nothing, but sounds real important.

Then all bank employees were told they Have To Watch the upcoming tv movie about Y2k, know their "glooblygook" pamplets and be prepared for many customers that will be withdrawing after they watch the movie.

-- Linda A, (adahi@muhlon.com), November 15, 1999

Answers

Teller to customer: "Your money should have been out LONG ago. Where y'all been folks?"

-- how to become (unemployed@very.quickly), November 15, 1999.

ROTFLMAO! Oh brother. We are still getting observations like this from the panic-prone?

-- You Knowwho (debunk@doomeridiots.com), November 15, 1999.

hmmm....how many weak links would it take to cause cascading bank defaults?I sure don't know.I wonder if the debunk idiot does?

-- zoobie (zoobiezoob@yahoo.com), November 15, 1999.

This sounds like this should be re-titled "My Brother the bank teller" Is he involved in remediation? Is he involved in IT? Is he invoved in high-level management where decisions are made about Y2K readiness? If not....phhhttttttt

-- Y2K Pro (y2kpro1@hotmail.com), November 15, 1999.

Zoob, save your breath man. It is a shallow poole of water that you address. A poole with no DEPTH will soon evaporate. Wow, Should I change my name to grasshopper? Nah, got to much grief when I changed it to......................

-- FLAME AWAY (BLehman202@aol.com), November 15, 1999.

The Trolls are Back ;-(

-- offonweekends? (karlacalif@aol.com), November 15, 1999.

OK...I'm telling the story and you can draw whatever conclusions you want from it.

I wanted to transfer some money my husband and I have in a CD to my checking acct. I walk into the woman's office and she looks at the monitor and says, "GOOD! Hold on just a second. My computer's been freezing up on me all morning and I couldn't get it to do a transaction before you came in. Maybe it'll do it now." I smiled to myself.

She asks my name and soc. sec. #. I give it to her and she reads my husb's. name off the screen. I said correct. She says, "How come you and your husband have different addresses?" I giggled and asked what she was talking about. I've been in the same home here for 23 years. She asked again for my soc. sec. #...put it in...and asked me to look at the screen.

There under my name was the address when I grew up on the outskirts of Baltimore. She asked if I had any idea why the computer was giving this as my address. I told her my dad and I years ago had had a money market acct. together and that had been his address. I also told her that he's been dead now for 3 1/2 years. That acct. was closed by me immediately after his death.

A man in a suit appears in her office doorway and asks if he can use her computer for just a moment. He said, "My computer's been frozen up and I can't do anything." I'm thinking...OK.

I asked the young woman what my bank's contingency plan was. Are they going to do thing manually or what? She smiles and says, "Oh no! There won't be any problems. Our computers are all fixed." I said, "What if the elec. utilities are having problems and you have no electricity?" She never answered me. We finished the transactions after she got her computer to cooperate. I came home to balance my checkbook. I attempted to get online with my bank to do the Quicken thing and couldn't connect with the system. Sigh.

beej

-- beej (beej@ppbbs.com), November 15, 1999.

I love computers that are so smart they use an old address that you didn't give them. That's how I had a UPS package go to Washington D.C. rather than where it was addressed.

-- Mara (MaraWayne@aol.com), November 15, 1999.

Flame away - I have to thank you, KOS and many, many others that have made me laugh SOOO much. Your wit and candor are endearing. My friend tipped me off to this site and I haven't laughed so much since, since..., okay, I can't remember when. You have to read my response to Mr. debunk on one of his other posts. I compare him to the bully that is intimidating Opie on Andy Griffith. Sometimes, I can be clever too rather than just sarcastic.

-- Guy Daley (guydaley@bwn.net), November 15, 1999.

Just had a bank experience where their computers were down. As an estate executor, this MM account was brought to 0 balance, Oct. 27th. Today I received the final statement and find a $10 SC, assuming this was because the balance was brought below a MM mimumun balance. So I call the bank and was told they could not access my acc. because their systems were down. I very politely asked what the problem seem to be and was told bad data had been entered on Friday causing their computer system to fail today. Not wanting to be pushee, I told her I would try again tomorrow, and let it go at that. Hmmmmm....

-- Tommy Rogers (Been there@Just a Thought.com), November 15, 1999.

I used to work in a bank, about five years ago. One day, we had a glitch in our central international transaction database at close of business. This isn't THAT unusual, but this time we discovered that part of one of the backups had failed (it had been failing for a long time, but we hadn't tried to restore from it, so didn't know. Sigh.). The upshot was that we couldn't get a two-out-of-three agreement for a SMALL number of transactions, "only" several thousand. As it turned out eventually, there was no problem in the main data, but here's the result of the uncertainty.

For one month afterwards, every branch of the bank was sent a printout of a few thousand affected account numbers. Every time we handled ANY transaction, we had to check the accounts involved against this list, and mark off the accounts. At the end of the day, we had to type up a list of the accounts that had transactions go through them, and send them off to our central processing. Why couldn't the computers do this themselves? Because no one had thought it necessary, and there was no time to get such a feature done.

In our central processing, staff were then pulling old paper and microfiche records (yes, hard copy!) and watching for anything going wrong in the effected accounts, basically in case we were denying payments on accounts that should have been in credit. Meanwhile, managers were taking case-by-case decisions to remove the less important accounts from the check list.

After a month, it all died down and we went back to normal. But the time investment in fixing a problem THAT NEVER HAPPENED was immense. The bank had to call up all of it's part time and reserve staff, and it couldn't have sustained this "backup" system for long, or if the problem had repeated itself.

Just so you know... :(

-- Colin MacDonald (roborogerborg@yahoo.com), November 16, 1999.

This sounds to me as though what Dale Way (hope I got his name right) was saying about other problems encountered from program remediation and new programs could cause some problems. I remember reading long ago that someone said it's almost better if the computer in banks and billing departments WOULD shut down. At least we'd know there was a problem.

Although having an old address is no biggie in the long run, what other info. is weird. I know two young men who are in the Army and deal with a military bank. One had direct deposit and told me he couldn't access it. He called the bank and they told him there was a problem and he'd be able to access his money in a couple of days. The other fellow attempted to use an ATM. He was told he had insufficient funds and his balance was below twenty dollars. He tried again and it told him a different number but still below 20. The last try it gave him the correct amt. and he withdrew funds. These are first hand accts. Let's hope things are all straightened out soon.

beej

-- beej (beej@ppbbs.com), November 16, 1999.

Of course, as you know, the Banks didn't make it.

Kiss the deposits good bye.

-- K. Stevens (kstevens@ It's ALL going away in January.com), November 16, 1999.