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I have a secret but I forgot what it is
(by Ed Flynn - May 21, 2008)
When you get to be my age you tend to forget a few things like what you had for lunch yesterday or where you put the car keys or sometimes even to put your teeth in in the morning. But the other day I had a Senior Moment that continues to haunt me. I can’t remember the name of my favorite restaurant.
Now you might wonder why this is important. Here’s the problem. Recently some nefarious character stole my credit card number and was going around running up charges on it. Fortunately, the credit card company, which apparently has a computer program that can detect unusual purchase patterns, cancelled the card and issued me a new one with a new number. The fraudulent charges were also deducted from my account. So far so good.
But then it occurred to me that AOL, the service I use for my e-mail and other on-line purposes was automatically charging my monthly bill against the old card number. So I figured I’d go on-line and let them know they should use the new number.
However, when I contacted AOL’s membership services on-line I was greeted by a message informing me that I had a “Security Question” and that to safeguard the security of my account I had to answer the question before I could proceed to the next step. The question? You guessed it. What was my favorite restaurant. Apparently when I had originally signed up with AOL, many years ago now, an AOL staffer and I had come up with this clever way of safeguarding the security of my account in case anyone should try to access it for information.
Of course by now I didn’t have the slightest idea what the right answer was. Was it the Old Hook Inn in Emerson? Nope. How about the Rudy’s in
Hackensack ? Wrong again. Maybe something simple like the Red Lobster in
Paramus ? Not only no cigar but I got a message informing me that since someone had tried three times to access my account with the wrong answer to the secret question, access to my account was being denied for 24 hours. Now I was not only feeling frustrated but I was afraid that I might have triggered some sort of computer security alert and a Homeland Security agent wearing dark glasses would be knocking on my door any minute.
So I waited 24 hours and since I still couldn’t remember the name of my favorite restaurant I figured there was no sense in trying to contact AOL on-line. Instead I decided to phone. Have you tried to phone any large corporation lately? In the first place they keep their real phone number a secret. You know that people who work there must have a number to use in case they want to call in sick but apparently it’s unlisted. The only numbers available to the general public – and even those aren’t always easy to find – are answered by machines.
In the case of AOL it turned out to be a robot with an pre-programmed electronic voice that asked a series of questions to determine why I was calling and then – you guessed it again – wanted to know the answer to my secret security question. I tried to explain that the reason I was phoning was because I couldn’t remember it but when I realized how stupid it was to be arguing with a robot I not only hung up, but I gave up. Let AOL find out for itself that my card was no longer valid, I decided. Maybe then they’d contact me.
Sure enough, shortly after the first of the month I got a message on-line from AOL informing me that there had been some difficulty with my card and providing a phone number that thankfully was answered by an honest-to-goodness real live person. I explained that I couldn’t remember the name of my favorite restaurant.
“No problem,” the Customer Service rep said and after answering a few other questions to confirm my identify we straightened out the credit card problem and decided to use my mother’s maiden name for future security use.
“By the way,” I asked the AOL customer service rep before hanging up, “I’m curious. What is my favorite restaurant?”
Believe it not or not, the rep told me that “for security reasons I’m not allowed to give out that information.”
Maybe it was a restaurant in
New York City like Manny Wolf’s or Gallagher’s? I guess I’ll never know. Gosh, now that I think of it, I better write my mother’s maiden name down some place before I forget that, too.
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