A Fool’s Wisdom

What contributes to me being a pretty good tester is that I have a knack for taking things apart, exploring the edges of a system, and breaking things.

How many times has someone said to you, “I’ve never seen that before?”

It happens to me quite a bit.

Case in point: I tried to have a wire sent to my TD Canada Trust line of credit account and it literally was lost in their system for a week. Every phone call with them ended with, “The problem is on the senders end, not ours.” Finally, I walked into a branch and wouldn’t leave until they found my money and got it into my account.

I bend the rules a little bit by basically using this account as a no fees chequing account with a healthy overdraft projection limit

Wire transfers is the only part of my account that was broken.

Anyway, regardless of how I use the account, more recently I wanted to have another wire sent to that account and didn’t want to encounter the same problem. An hour in a branch later and they figure out somehow my line of credit, set up in the year 2000, had been created using an internal branch number that is actually a call center. So there is no one there to process wire transfers.

The only option in the end was to close the account and open a new one. Another day, another hour spent with Julia at the branch and we have a new account number, our automatic transactions are set back up and new cheques are ordered. I imagine the very helpful Financial Services Representative spent many more hours getting a new line of credit approved with the same interest rate modifier.

This is an example of how I have a knack of testing the edges of a system. I previously wrote about my experience with TurboTax. I have many examples like this.