Old people and pensions

This will be the first post in a loooooong series of the stupid and annoying things that old people do when trying to take money from their card accounts.

A bit of background first. About five or six years ago (I can't remember exactly due to being drunk and can't be bothered to find out due to being drunk and lazy) the old system of pension books was replaced. The main reason for this was to cut down on fraud. Some of this was done by the customers using fake or altered books to get more cash but the majority was done by postmasters. Sadly this was while I was still a counter clerk and I so missed out on this little earner. The reason so much fraud was perpetrated by postmasters was every week, all of the pension dockets we had cashed got sent off for processing. Apparently, less than one percent of these returns were actually checked. To get round all this the card account was created. It's a very basic bank account that can have benefits and pensions paid in and that will allow you to withdraw the money from a post office using a chip and pin card.

Anyhoo, back to the subject.

As you can probably imagine, this led to all manner of complaining from the coffin dodgers. They're well known for embracing change, remembering things and adapting to new technology doncha know.

Predictably enough this led to about two years of certain customers moaning about the change every single time they came in and how "they're only changing it for the sake of it!" Counter arguments as to why it was changed and how it's actually a change for the better (for all but brain-dead whingebags) fell on deaf ears. Literally in some cases.

The first major hurdle we faced was filling in the application forms. They were only simple but there were a few stumbling blocks that caught out a lot of applicants. The forms had to be filled in in black ink only. There were little boxes on the form that you had to write in, one letter per box. As the forms were machine read it was vitally important that these two criteria were fulfilled otherwise the machine spat the form out and they needed to be filled in again. The final major stumbling block was the ID that needed to be produced to support the application. The customer would never bring in the right sort ("What? You mean this 20 year old photograph with my name on it isn't enough?").

It's not as if it's that difficult to remember either. It said it in nice bold print on the form. It got so bad that we started telling people in very small words and very sloooooowly that they needed to use a black pen and not to go outside the lines. Also, here is a list of ID we need to see. Failure to adhere to these very simple rules will result in us giving you back the form and telling you to fill in a new one. Unless we disliked the customer more than normal in which case we'd send it off anyway as that would mean a three week wait before the form was returned to them.

One of the things that needed to be sent off with the application was the personal invitation document (PID) that the benefits agency would send to the customer to prove that they were eligible for this account. The PID was valid for six months after the date of printing. Some customers managed to fuck up so many forms and take so long applying for these accounts that their PIDs would be out of date. Six months. Twats.