Today’s lessons

Sunday August 30th 2020

So if I have learnt anything over the years it’s that you don’t know what you don’t know. Now I have always thought that I have been keeping up with technology, at least to have a pretty good idea of how things work … well that came into question today.

As with every lesson there is normally a price, and today was no exception. So as usual Sunday at one o’clock is pump out time, not my favourite job but a task that is a twice a week reality, so imagine my surprise to be pulled from the task at hand to be grilled by the OPP (Ontario Province Police). Apparently on one of the recent updates on our apple phones, it had turned the side button into a SOS button. So if held down it calls 911 which of course initiates a visit from the local police force … well my phone was in my pocket and I guess when I was seated on the tractor it obviously dialed 911, because of the noise from the tractor and the pump, I didn’t hear the phone and because of my cargo shorts I never noticed the vibration when the OPP tried to called back.

What made it touchy was that the officer had been told that there was a woman’s voice asking for help … so Miss Laurie was questioned to see if she was calling for help on my phone … long story short as much as I annoy her at times she didn’t want to see me locked up yet. So add a couple of cruisers and a little quality time with the local constabulary it was agreed that the only crime I was guilty of was pocket dialing 911, and this has been happening enough and become enough of an issue that the officer was able to show me how to shut the SOS side button feature off to prevent it happening again.

So what else have I learnt this week … well I learnt how backwards the US banking system is. Like for a country that acts like they are leading edge … they are leap years behind the Canadian banking system. And it always amazes me how the border can make things fall apart. Here in Canada we have something called an “e transfer”, all of our financial institutions use this, so for $1.50 I can send a couple of thousand dollars to anyone’s email address or cellphone and they can open the email and pick the financial institution of their choice and deposit it right into their bank account with nothing more than a password of both parties choice. Start to finish probably less that one hour and it’s done.

But here is how antiquated the American system is, we have an account in the US, I needed to send a few hundred dollars to reserve our spot on our Mexican caravan so I contacted my US bank to send the money, but because I’m still here in Canada this could not be accomplished. The only way I could take US dollars and send to anyone in the US would be to go to the bank, and of course the American system doesn’t have nation wide banking like Canada, and with the whole US Covid mess we can’t cross the border so I had to fall back onto our Canadian banking system to get the job done.

So by simply logging into my Canadian bank account I was able to send US dollars directly to the American bank account of Adventure Nation Caravans in the States, with a couple of key strokes and it’s a done deal. If there is one thing that has become very apparent that our southern neighbour is a number of years behind our banking system.

This is what I have learnt this weekend, I can only imagine what this week will bring on. So remember you don’t know what you don’t know, until you do … just saying.