Re: Unique keys
Not so much father and Son but Grandfather and Grandson. My Grandfather and I share the exact same name. My father has a different name. So no Sr. Jr, or I, II, II, etc. We both lived in the same town, and by coincidence we shared the same house number on different streets in the same city, This took place back in the early 1990's
Local bank was nice, but was bought out by a bigger bank. So far no problem. Then an even larger bank comes in and renumbers the accounts, using Lastname, Firstname for ordering of accounts with the new numbers. Now My account, My parents Account, 2 Uncles, 1 aunt, and my grandparent's accounts are in sequence, instead of spread out over many years of account number increments. All of a sudden My checks are bouncing. Seems my paycheck was being deposited, by the teller into my grandfather's account. Checks I wrote were either processed by his account or by mine, but since my account had no money the one processed on the right bounced. Grandfather was having similar problems. Our account numbers were different by the last digit alone. When you looked at the screen, the accounts were almost identical, except for street name. Same house number, same First, Middle, and Last names. There were even mixing my other relative's accounts. We checked, even our SSN numbers were similar but because of timing the first half was very different. The last 4 were similar, but with even mild dyslexia they would look the same.
It took us 3 months to get them to see they had made errors, and that the "big bank" was at fault. The fun part was that my father, an attorney specializing in Ranch law (Lots of land contracts, stock agreements, banking, etc) walked in with every member of our extended family, and handed them a request for everyone's account information. We had all signed it. When the Account manager started to say he couldn't do that, the local branch manager was called and told he needed to be at the bank within the next 30 minutes or we were going to take the bank to court. Shortly there after the Branch manager was there, in his office sweating the proverbial bullets as he read over our complaint, and watched as we sorted there every transactions since they renumbered our account with my Accountant Uncle. They then showed them each and every Banking law they had broken with their negligence. It was fun watching them go back and forth tearing down the Branch manager. Then I stepped up, being a computer programmer (recent graduate at the time) to show them how they could have avoided that with a simple change to the probable routine they used to renumber all our accounts. After that we pulled all our money from the bank, IN CASH (not cashier's checks), walked across the road to the local credit union and opened accounts there, making sure that they didn't number our account sequentially. I believe we took out about a quarter of their on-hand cash at that point. I know they didn't keep much on-hand, and would send to the larger District bank about 3 hours away if for some reason they needed more. It wasn't a payday week so they wouldn't have had extra on-hand.
Approximately 6 months later the local office of the big bank was forcibly closed, and the government had to step in. I don't have many details as we had already closed our accounts, and were only notified of the FDIC stepping in because there may have been money owed to us. No other notifications were sent to us after that one.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
