Certainties of Life

There are times in life when one’s own certainties, however trivial, take an unexpected tumble in a crushing and spectacular way to end up in a heap of embarrassment. One such moment of embarrassment occurred to me recently when something that I was convinced was a certainty turned out to be nothing more than a fervent belief. I hasten to add that the certainty that I am referring to is quite trivial as certainties of life go. It is by no means some profound truth that is universally held to be undeniable. The episode that led to this modest certainty being embarrassingly shattered began with my attempt at using the fairly recent innovation of on-line banking. I use on-line banking sparingly. I am not yet weaned from the pen and cheque method of money transfer. It so happened that I had not used the on-line facility of my bank for over a year. Had I known that sporadic use of on-line banking only caused the bank’s computer system to treat an occasional customer with suspicion, if not downright hostility, I may well have foregone its use altogether. But bliss as I was in my ignorance of the mysterious ways in which the security of on-line banking worked, I proceeded blithely to tackle the first hurdle that confronts all customers of internet banking: the secure log-on. This consisted of a combination of three security parameters including a user-id, a so-called passcode, and a six-digit pin number. I had entered all of these with great care and utmost attention, when to my alarm, the log-on process asked for further, entirely unexpected security information that I was totally unprepared for. The log-on process, quite capriciously as far as I could make out, suddenly demanded to know what my father’s middle name was. Now I am aware that these kind of personal questions are a part of the checks and safeguards that are embedded in on-line banking systems for security purposes. Typically such security questions are asked when the user is unable to provide a valid password or has completely forgotten what it is. But I was incredulous that of all the questions that the system could have put to me for an additional security check, it should have been that about my father’s middle name. My incredulity was not as misconceived as might be imagined. It so happens that in the matter of security questions of this kind, the user usually has a choice of several security related questions from which he may choose one, whose answer would be something personal to him. Thus the user may opt, for example, to use the name of the last school that he attended, as the security question for an additional security check, - should it become necessary. My preferred security question has always been the one that asked for my mother’s maiden name, or so I had always believed until recently. I have a good reason for preferring to do so. My mother’s maiden name although of Indian origin happens to be sufficiently short and simple to make it easily pronounceable, even for those who as a matter of principle remain averse to pronouncing foreign names. My father’s middle name on the other hand, whilst also of Indian origin or perhaps because of it, is a tongue twister of such ferocity as to defy all normal rules of English pronunciation. To attempt to pronounce it is to submit to a verbal form of sado-masochism. I would therefore never have inflicted it on anyone even as a response to a security question, - or so I had convinced myself until being asked for it unexpectedly by the bank’s security system. My unshakable belief that I could never have used my father’s middle name, provoked in me such an unsettling feeling of paranoia that I convinced myself that somehow my personal details on the bank’s security system had been compromised, - most likely as a consequence of some nefarious hacking activity of which lately there seems to be so much coverage in the media. The dark underworld of hacking and cyber fraud holds unspeakable terrors for ordinary mortals like me. Amateurs that we are, we only skirt on the edges of the internet and have only a superficial understanding of its intricacies. I decided therefore that I needed urgently to seek expert help to deal with this frightening security beach. In great agitation, I phoned the helpdesk of my bank. The helpdesk assistant that I was connected to, was almost a model of courtesy and effortless efficiency. After successfully completing the inevitable security checks, I explained to him the purpose of my call: my possibly baseless but firm conviction that my security details had been tampered with. If this grave pronouncement had the Helpdesk adviser sitting up in alarm, my account of what had actually occurred may well have had him intrigued and possibly even hanging his head in despair: what was he to make of a customer who alleges that his so-called unique security question has been tampered with and replaced by a fake one? Conscious of the likely implausibility of my contention, I was hesitant myself as I began to explain to the adviser my reason for believing that the security question I was presented with could never have been one of my choice, - that my father’s middle name was so excruciatingly unpronounceable to native English speakers, that I would never have embarrassed myself or them by using it as part of a security question. I asked the adviser if he could tell me from his computer records exactly what my security question should have been, as that would address my fear that some hacking activity had maliciously altered my real security question to a spurious one that wasn’t of my choice. The adviser did appear to understand my concerns but such is the nature of the checks and safeguards that protect security information of my bank’s clients, that even the adviser could not tell me exactly what my security question was or should have been, as that information was withheld even from him. This of course was not what I had expected from the helpdesk, reassuring though it was to me that my personal data was seemingly inviolate even from casual access by the bank’s helpdesk advisers. Despairing at what I might do next, I asked the adviser, rather in the manner of a confused old man muttering to himself, whether I ought to try and reply to the security question, as requested, provide my father’s middle name, and be done with it, - no matter how hopelessly unpronounceable the name was. The helpdesk adviser’s reaction was one of enthusiastic support. “Why not,” he said, “Go for it”. I wasn’t sure if I was quite so ready to go forth as boldly as the adviser’s exhortation had implied but under the circumstances I had no option but to act on my own suggestion and put my elaborately constructed theory of a security breach to the test. Certain in my belief that I would be vindicated by the outcome of the test, I typed in my father’s middle name as required by the security system and waited with smug confidence for the expected error message that would prove my point. I waited in vain. For to my consternation, and perversely to my horror, the system accepted my father’s middle name as the correct response to the security question. In an instant I realised that everything that I had averred about the impossibility of my ever using my father’s middle name in response to a security question now seemed utterly foolish. I made a pretence of being excited that that my security problems were finally over but I was actually quite wretched. I announced with fake excitement to the helpdesk advisor that the system had accepted my security response and allowed me in. I offered my apologies for having contacted him unnecessarily for a problem that turned out not to have been a problem at all. He was of course gracious about it, - indeed delighted for me, and bid me a cheery good day as he concluded our conversation. He may well have hung up with the satisfaction of having done a good job but to me the whole encounter had been an extraordinary experience. What had begun as a perfectly innocuous attempt at using internet banking had somehow left me pondering on the nature of life’s certainties. If a certainty of life could be as fragile as mine had proven to be, then my understanding of a certainty was seriously flawed. I can now apprehend that certainties of life are least prone to being shattered when they are based on empirical evidence or received wisdom of many generations. Regrettably, the certainty that I had assumed, and which prompted me to phone the helpdesk in some panic, was based on neither. If I had only paused to think, I would have realised that my certainty was not a certainty of my life. It was rather a certainty of my imagination: I had conjured up a certainty in my mind from nothing more than a fervent belief that I would never have contemplated using my father’s middle name as a memorable security word. On reflection, I should have been wiser than to allow myself to commit the folly of ascribing to my fervent belief the attributes of a certainty. But I had done so and had accordingly suffered a shock when the assumptions of my imagined certainty had been proven false by the evidence of my own actions carried out in reality.