Tuesday 23 February 2016

Using Irony To Mock

The lottery syndicate that I run is quite old-school. Payments are made in cash. The money is kept in a cigar box in a locked draw and there are signed paper records. The spreadsheet is just to help me keep up to date.  Some of the lazier and less social members would rather pay by bank transfer. I think they'd like to make transfers into my personal bank account and then expect me to pore over my online statements every week to figure out who's paid what.

(no I'm not going to build an encoder and decoder so that I can programmatically feed my pin into the keypad circuitry of the pin machine and read the login-key out of the seven segment display - and then write software to scrape payment details from my online banking pages. Neither am I going to build a machine to physically type the pin number in and OCR the login-key but that does sound like more fun.)

I was brought up in a household almost completely without sarcasm. I've almost learned to use it in later life, but not always with great success. Last week I tried to use sarcasm to explain that the syndicate would never accept bank transfers, but the target out-sarcasm'd me by a wide and artful margin. In fact I initially wondered whether his reply was serious.

*****email from organiser to member*****
Indeed, so when you transfer money in to this new account the back end systems recognise your account number or your payment reference and credit the Xxxx Xxxxxxx client account within the lottery account? Good idea!

You find a bank that will host that type of account for free, and get authorisation from the FSA for me to keep other people’s money in trust, and I’ll link it up to my accounting system.
*****Reply*****
Awesome Rich, that would be amazing, and effectively more secure potentially than dashing across the office with a fistful of notes potentially risking a mugging.

Once setup if you could let me know the valid numbers for such an account I shall set you up with my trusted banking organisation.
***** *****

Richard "There’s no shame in being beaten by the best" B

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