The country's no place fer a mobile phone!

Living in the country, we struggle at the best of times to get any appreciable mobile system.  Between us, the family has been through the whole range of service providers with variable results.  Most of the time this is a minor irritation but occasionally it becomes a fag.

These days when you want to spend a reasonable amount of money online or to set up a payment, sensible banks will occasionally ask you to confirm details.  They do this by sending a 'one time passcode', or OTP.  This is an admirable idea and one I fully support, even as I am leaning out of the bathroom window holding my phone at arm's length, weakly imploring this magic that is a mobile signal to smile on me and bless my device with a connection. 

The key problem is that these OTPs are time limited, so often once I have managed to complete a pilates exercise of rare athleticism, the deadline has passed and I have to start all over again.

Security is very clearly A Good Thing but I wonder if the people who design the processes live anywhere where they get fewer than four bars on their phones.  Perhaps we need a system of couriers in remote villages like mine, employing someone retired to sit at the end of a phone, where they could be contacted with a unique message to enable transactions.

It couldn't be a code, as most of us would forget this if we tried to remember it or destroy the security if we scribbled it on the first piece of paper we could find when we took the call.  No one would have paper ready by the phone and if they did, they should not be trusted as they would very demonstrably be a psychopath.  Instead, these venerable sentinels could be given a book title to share - in person at the door.  That'd stop the hacker boys in Kazakhstan, I imagine.

Maybe hi-tech needs to embrace low-tech to be truly inclusive.

(NB: am patenting this idea now.)

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