Post Office account

I honestly can't remember how old I was when I opened my first account. I was never very good at saving money: my pocket money went on sweets and comics and then, once I had a job, I spent it all on records. Later, as I got older and I earned a bit more, the surplus went on beer.

At some point, though, probably in my mid-teens I opened an account. I suppose around 1980 or 1981. I remember when you went in to deposit some money or take some out, you'd hand over your book and as well as adjusting the balance figure, they'd update it with any interest. I guess they must have had access to a computer system behind the counter, I really can't remember.

It's odd because in Hong Kong in the mid-seventies, we already had ATMs. I can remember us parking up at Dairy Lane on the road between Mount Kellett, where we lived, and the Peak, so my mum or dad could hop out of the car to get some cash. By the mid-eighties, when I went to university, we had 'hole in the wall'.cash machines here, too, though. 

During my career as an IT freelancer in the nineties, I worked for a number of banks and building societies. Some of the work was to move financial data onto new systems: bits of the old software would date back to the sixties and seventies, which was when my dad was working on similar systems for the Standard Bank in London and then Hong Kong. (I am second generation IT!)

I remember on one data migration, working for a company whom I won't name, I was responsible for testing the migration process. I was frustrated because I just couldn't get the numbers to add up: basically, the number of customers and accounts leaving the old system wouldn't tally with the new system. 

Of course, I reported this and kept raising errors and investigations and, for a while, people seemed curiously uninterested. Eventually, though I was taken to one side and it was explained to me that there were gaps in the 'data integrity' - i.e. how the data all hung together - on the source system. For example, there were direct debts paying money in but nothing on the system to say which policies they were for. This was only twenty years ago although it was, of course, the legacy of decades of paper-based systems. 

I mention all this because while I was (still) sorting out the music room, today, I came across Hannah's Post Office account book. I think my Nan opened accounts for her and Charlie but by the time Izzy might have been given one in the late nineties, I guess the day of the account book had passed. Or does anyone still have one?

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