Computer illiteracy
Our real estate agent is computer illiterate. This is due to the fact that, when computers were invented, she was about 50. Now she’s about 75 and hasn’t got a clue what a ‘mouse’ is, let alone an ‘email’. She deals with this issue by employing her “girl” who, “comes in on Tuesday to do the computer stuff”.
This wouldn’t be a problem if the majority of rent payments in 2005 weren’t made using internet banking. Heaven forbid!
Basically the system works like this. You make a payment using internet banking. The money is transfered to her account and entered by her “girl” with the date and amount into column one.
Column two represents the dates that the rent covers. Simple.
now, pay attention ’cause this is where it appears to get complicated”
If you fall behind in your payments, as we tend to do - considering that we are poor students living week-to-week, then irrespective of when you pay the rent, the second column just carries on the dates from the last paid period. So, for example, if you’re behing on 12 February, when you pay, it’ll just go towards the last two weeks of January.
Our real estate agent has issues with this. Her deep mistrust of technology means that there must be a mistake, i mean who would get behind in their rent, after all?
I made the mistake of tipping her off last time we met (late last year, about 2 days before heading away for a month i had to go and meet with her etc…) and now she’s onto it.
I just got a phone message saying, “you’re well-and-truly behind”. This ‘well and truly’ is a grand total of 4 weeks, or two payments. Gasp!. She said I can go in there and get a print out of the payments and reconcile that against a print out of my bank statement… (or, Zoe could just pay her rent)… but, i think i’ll slow things up a bit by emailing her a zipped Excel file or something with macros running to calculate monthly averages or something…
Maybe I could email her some of my PhD data and see how we go 
Actually, I don’t want to be too mean on the “girl”.
p.s. I like computer literate oldies. Zoe’s granddad is a force, has a website and surfs the net like a madman on his Mac. He’s probably got friends he IMs with too