DaveTraynor.com

I remember years ago hearing talk about how there was so much money squirreled away in old accounts and that it was difficult for banks to close those accounts. So they (the banks) wanted to find a way to do it without having to wait years, or having to track down the owners, etc. I think I may have written a story about it at one time.

Well, it appears that those clever banks have found a way around that. It’s called a service charge. You know what I’m talking about. We pay them all the time, to banks, waiters, rental firms — all kinds of places. Usually, they’re tied to some kind of service that you’ve received, hence the name.

You don’t notice them that much when you’re using your bank account. For example, you pay one when you withdraw money, or write a cheque, or use your debit card, etc. If you don’t want to pay each time, you can sometimes pay a lump sum each month and then get “unlimited” access to your accounts.

But what you might not notice is that most accounts now include a charge called a “monthly fee” or something like that. It’s just a fee you pay, no matter what you do that month. Sometimes those fees are waived if you maintain a minimum balance, but in most cases, they just get added to your account each month.

“It’s in the mail”

This morning, I got a bank statement in the mail. I opened it, because it had my address on it. But after I’d ripped open the envelope, I noticed that while it was my address, it wasn’t my name. Ooops! But wait a minute. That is my address, so what the heck is going on? So I looked a little closer.

According to the statement, a couple (presumably, since both of their names are on there) had opened an account, with my home address, on Feb 13, 1999. That was about 18 months after we’d bought the house. First big problem.

Also, according to the statement, after opening the account, they made one deposit, for $242.47. And that’s it. No further activity on the account. Presumably, it might even have been a mistake or whatever, because nothing more was ever done with the account.

Enter the service charge

Except the account was a “Powerchequing” account. So every month from then on, $2 was deducted at the end of each month as a service charge, just for the privilege of having the account. The bank didn’t do anything, except process the service charge. There was no interest calculated. Nothing. Except that $2 each month.

So over the years, the $2 has been grinding away, until finally, the bank had taken every dime out of the account.

The service charges weren’t always the same. On October 31, 2000, the monthly charge went up to $2.50 per month. And then on April 15, 2002, there was an extra service charge of $20. With no explanation.

On Mar 31, 2005, the service charge jumped to $3.50 per month. And on April 15, 2005, there is another unexplained service charge of $30.

OK, now here’s the funny part. On Sept 30, 2005, the monthly service charge of $3.50 put the account into the red. The balance is now $-2.53. So the bank added an overdraft interest charge of $.04 to the total. The next month — same thing.

It takes until Feb. 23, 2006, when the account is overdrawn to the tune of $20.78 before the bank takes action. Since they’re not actually getting any money out of this thing anymore, they simply deposit $20.78 into the account to bring the balance back to $0.00 and close it. Simple.

Then, a few weeks later, I get this notice. As far as I know, this is the first bank statement I’ve received this whole time, although the name sounds familiar, so there may have been other mail over the last 7 years. But I don’t think any of it was a bank statement.

Who’s your Daddy?

The bottom line is that although this money was abandoned, and left dormant in a bank account that the owner had probably forgotten about, the bank has made sure that they won’t have any trouble tracking down the rightful owner. Thanks to the power of the service charge, they now have all the money. So they can just close it down.

I’m still left wondering about those two big service charges, one for $20 and one for $30. What could possibly justify those kinds of charges on an account that had never had any action except the automatic debits of service charges?

Chalk up another win for the bank and the power of service charges. They’re sort of the evil cousin of compound interest, aren’t they?

In a previous life, I was a reporter for The Saskatoon Star Phoenix, covering the legislature in Regina. Our sister paper was The Regina Leader Post, and before my newspaper career was over, I ended up working for both of them, through a shared legislature bureau called Leader Star news.

I left the newspaper business in October, 1995, to join the Corporate Communications world with SaskTel. My timing was great. Three months later, Conrad Black bought both papers and a few short months later engineered one of the largest mass firings in Canadian media history.

One of my colleagues from those days was Bill Doskoch, who is now a blogger and works as an editor for CTV.ca. In a recent post, he describes the carnage 10 years ago when he and a lot of his colleagues at the Leader Post and Star Phoenix were fired.

It’s quite a story, and I can’t help but think of how lucky I was to have gotten out of there in the nick of time. Some of my friends survived those days and are still with the papers. But I don’t think things have ever been the same. Of course, things have gone downhill for Conrad Black as well, but that’s still small consolation for all those he so ruthlessly tossed out into the street.

Thanks to Eric at Mutually Inclusive for the link.

You might have noticed that I’ve started adding Technorati Tags to each of my posts as my contribution to the social bookmarking movement. Before you ask why, let me explain that I’m not even sure that I understand what the heck they’re doing. But it’s a cool way to look for information on sites like Technorati, where you can search the blogosphere for just about anything.

I’ve also started posting items to del.icio.us, which you can check out and follow yourself. Those items are also tagged.

And I have a Flickr account, where some of my pictures are tagged, although I’ve just started adding tags and most of them aren’t there yet.

All of these sites are considered part of this Web 2.0 phenomenon, which I’ve written about before and plenty of others are writing about all the time. (See this Technorati Search on Web 2.0)

Despite all of the above, I don’t have a great handle on what’s going on, but it’s fun to be playing along. Today, I came across an interesting post (thanks to BlackRimGlasses.com) which pointed me to a blog called Eirepreneur, and a post called How Social Bookmarking can lead to the Semantic Web. Talk about a lot of cool connections, and I don’t even know any of those guys’ names!

OK, so now we’ve moved from social bookmarking, which I only kind of understand, on to the semantic web, which I really don’t know much about. But as I read the post, I became fascinated by the discussion. Just how do we identify, sort and act on information? What kind of markers can we use to pass along our knowledge, and can we find ways to do it that work even when we don’t realize what’s happening? That’s what seems to be happening with Social Bookmarking. It’s happening, although we aren’t quite sure what “it” is.

This is a dynamic post (to coin another popular phrase.) That just means I don’t have a conclusion — I’m just watching what’s going on to see where it goes. In the meantime, consider how Social Bookmarking, or Tagging, or Linking, or whatever you want to call it, might fit into your own world. And don’t be afraid to start using it. It’s pretty cool and you might even make some new friends along the way. Next, I’m sure we’ll all be creating our own MySpace pages.

I’m sure there will be more to come in this area. And, by the way, feel free to add your own thoughts to this conversation by commenting on what I’ve done here.

As a former resident, I can’t resist linking to this video of someone in Regina, Saskatchewan (apparently outside the SaskPower building, from what I can tell) throwing boiling water into the air at -40C. The result is pretty cool.

As crazy as it sounds, this is actually becoming a popular fad in Regina in the cold weather. A couple of years ago, I was in Mexico during the winter and one of my travel companions noticed that the CBC Morning show back in Regina was talking about people doing just that very thing (at -30C). So we came up with a great plan to throw a cup of water up in the air at +30C, capture the results on video and e-mail them back to Saskatchewan. Alas, the video camera didn’t work and then it was happy hour and after a couple of Margaritas, we forgot about it. Just as well, since we were planning to send the video to a radio program anyway!

And thanks to Cory Doctorow at Boing, Boing for pointing out the story.

There are two threads to this post.

First, it seems really easy to get a story in the media about how if you don’t keep a close watch on your employees, they’ll screw your company. The vehicle of choice usually seems to be giving them Internet access.

Over at Techdirt today, there’s a good post about how the latest survey purporting to support that idea is once again shown to be sponsored by a company with an obvious conflict of interest.

As the post points out, there are so many reasons why employees should use the Internet at work that it’s hard to know where to start:

But, did they bother to look at whether or not that personal surfing was actually damaging? Nah. Did they look at whether or not that personal surfing helped give employees a much needed break that helped them be more productive while working? Nah. Did they look at how people who were blocked from personal surfing found other ways to waste time? Nah. Did they look at how those who are allowed to personal surf at work often use it to take care of tasks that would otherwise take them away from work? Nah. Did they look at how so many companies today expect employees to be on call so that work invades their home as well? Nah. Did they look at how allowing personal surfing at work tends to make happier, more loyal employees? Nah. Or did they look at any of the other research that has shown that employees who do personal surfing at work tend to more than make it up by doing work at home? Nah, of course not.

The second thread is similar. We are too obsessed with “security,” these days. It’s become much easier to slap a “restricted” label on something and limit access than to assess it realistically and figure out who should see the information. In fact, that’s the wrong way to look at information. Instead of “who should see this?” it should be, “Who should not see this?” In most cases, there is really no good reason to restrict access, beyond the obvious “because.”

It’s ironic that as tools proliferate to allow us to access more information, there are so many people convinced we need to restrict access. It’s not that simple. As Adam Curry puts it on his weblog, “There are no secrets. Only information you do not yet have.”

We need to make sure that people have access to the information they need to do their jobs better. But we also need to make sure that they continue to have access to as much information as possible, without arbitrary restrictions that are based more on the old “information is power” paradigm so many people still subscribe to.

I know there is a lot more to this story. We could get into protecting personal information, financial information, etc. I don’t mean to negate the idea of security. But I do think that the knee-jerk “secure this” has become a crutch for many people. We need to rethink all of our access to information provisions, both public and private.

Seth Godin has a pointer to a hilarious video on YouTube – microsoft ipod packaging parody.

As he puts it, “If you’ve ever worked in a place with more than three marketers, this is so accurate, you might cry.”

So true…

UPDATE — If you didn’t catch this video when I posted this note, you’re out of luck now. It’s been removed from You Tube. Sorry…

Wow! I got two posts mentioned in the PR briefs note on the Mutually Exclusive PR weblog. Now I know I’ve really arrived.

Actually, Eric Eggertson, who runs the blog, is an old friend of mine from Regina and one of the best PR bloggers around. His insights and wry humour inject a note of Prairie reality into the sometimes rarified air of corporate communications. Since he entered the realm last year, he’s become one of my must-reads. And he’s also been kind enough to send quite a few readers my way.

Thanks Eric. And keep ’em coming!

Here’s a story that says we’re working harder but getting less done. That seems to fit with the anecdotal evidence I see around me every day. People talk about how busy they are and how they don’t have time to get everything done. That seems to be at odds with all these great time-saving technologies we’re all so busy adopting. But the new hardware and software doesn’t seem to help. In fact, if studies like this are to be believed, they might be a big part of the problem.

Here’s an excerpt from the Wired News article, just to give you the flavour:

Unlike a decade ago, U.S. workers are bombarded with e-mail, computer messages, cell phone calls, voicemails and the like, research showed.

The average time spent on a computer at work was almost 16 hours a week last year, compared with 9.5 hours a decade ago, according to the Day-Timer research released this week.

Workers typically get 46 e-mails a day, nearly half of which are unsolicited, it said.

Sixty percent of workers say they always or frequently feel rushed, but those who feel extremely or very productive dropped to 51 percent from 83 percent in 1994, the research showed.

Put another way, in 1994, 82 percent said they accomplished at least half their daily planned work but that number fell to 50 percent last year. A decade ago, 40 percent of workers called themselves very or extremely successful, but that number fell to just 28 percent.

What should we take from this information? Well, we’re moving in the wrong direction, despite the technological advances we’ve made. We haven’t learned how to use technology to our advantage, at least in a consistent way. We have learned how to take advantage of technology in a larger sense. Our corporations are more profitable than they’ve ever been and real advances have been made in all sorts of areas.

But we have not been as quick with figuring out how technology helps our society in a “social” sense. How are communities made stronger by high technology? How does the ability to bring people together in a virtual world translate into a better “real” world? We don’t have those answers. We’re not even asking the questions yet. We’re starstruck by the potential wins and not paying enough attention to the issues we’re facing right now.

In a company, this shows up in issues like switching from print newsletters to intranets. Features that used to be standard in a print publication, like employee profiles, retirement notices, death notices, upcoming social events, etc., are often discarded. They’re not seen as driving business anymore and they get dropped from the “instant-on” Intranets. (This isn’t to condemn Intranets — just to point out that some of the “social” benefits of the older technology get overlooked when we switch to the newer models.)

We expect employees to work harder. We monitor their performance more closely. And we’re more likely to question their work habits if they don’t measure up to business objectives. In theory, this should make us more efficient, but in practice, as studies like this are starting to indicate, we are becoming less efficient. Or at least, we think we are less efficient and that could be the same thing.

We need some new measures for how we decide whether we’re working well and whether the companies we work for are measuring up. Bottom line performance is only one measurement. When it’s the only one used, it’s hard on employees. But if we were to broaden the measurement base to include items like job satisfaction, community involvement, creativity — there could be a lot on this list — we would be able to judge the merits of our business world in a more socially responsible manner.

A change is coming, I’m sure of it. And while the rapid adoption of new technologies is part of the problem, it’s also the key to a solution. We’ve just got to keep asking the right questions.

I’m a writer. I also like to hear other writers talk about how they write. This list of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing is one I really like. It’s good advice and good reading too. We’re all writers, even if all we write are e-mails to colleagues. Everyone benefits when we put a little thought into how we communicate with each other.

(Thanks to 43Folders for the link)