Comments | tague: Me Parse Pretty One Day

tague

Me Parse Pretty One Day

Aug 15, 2003 21:56

This evening, I logged on my bank to discover a smoking crater where my accounts used to be. ATM withdraw, ATM withdraw, $3,333 to PG&E, groceries. Whoops, that's not right. Okay there's few nrrd toys floating around the house, but there's no way I used that much electricity last month. In fact, I'm pretty sure when I last left that bill the ( Read more... )

Comments 3

sierra_nevada August 16 2003, 13:11:25 UTC

So, you "push" money at your creditors, rather than have them "pull" it from your account?

One thing to note: Europeans use period where we use comma, and vice versa, e.g. $1,000.00 == $1.000,00

Isn't that just precious?

-Erik

Very precious tague August 16 2003, 14:13:48 UTC

I prefer the push model in this case. I get to control where and when (modulo bad number parsing) a creditor gets paid. I don't really trust creditors to debit my account directly in the pull model, because I lose control - and lets face it nothing spurs negotiation like withholding a payment.

The irony of the European versus American parsing of that string of characters wasn't lost on me, there are so many reasons why you want to reject that input as bad - even if you don't reject it, failing in the make the number really big case isn't the best design choice.

Sadly, the lack of strick product liability laws for software doesn't help matters any. Why invest all that time and money into testing when you don't face any real consequnces for shipping bad software. I remember when I started programming, we had nearly a one to one ratio of testers to developers - no one uses anything near that close these days.

This whole situation would be hilarious if it was happening to someone else.

pushme-pullyu & SQA sierra_nevada August 16 2003, 17:51:20 UTC

I also push, because I want that level of control, too. The trouble with it is that you have to do the work every month, so it's not automatic. For those things that have a fixed amount (e.g. mortgage, HOA dues, ISP), I have an automated push of the same amount every month, so at least I don't have to think about those. However, given the chance, I'd automate the whole mess so that I wouldn't have to think about any of it unless I was about to violate some upper limit on my spending.

A friend of mine has actually done this; his bank is small and customer friendly, and he has a series of small accounts set up, one per vendor, and then arranged with the vendor to pull from their assigned account. He then arranges for an automated transfer an amount that should cover normal operating expenses for that vendor into their "pull account" on a monthly basis.

This places a close upper limit on what the vendor can take from him, and I'd imagine (but don't know) that if he is in dispute with a vendor, he tells the bank to suspend the vendor's ( ... )