Ultra Security

Two programme managers ago I dodged the honour of filling a soon to be vacant slot citing verifiable financial incompetence on my part.  How ironic that I am now the one holding the Standard Bank dongle in complete financial control of a multi million dollar project. 

Well not really. Thankfully there are still people who tell me what to do but, however temporarily, it is my finger on the button and if I suddenly lost my marbles, traversing pavements could be oh so dodgy.  

Rest assured I treat the dongle and my now linked laptop as I would two barely sub critical masses of Plutonium. Fingers and thumbs? Try paralysed big toes. One misplaced comma, an inadvertent decimal point, could cost the company millions. How could this be? I am sixty five years old and if I want funds to pass from my account to another, I write a cheque, not fondle a dongle.

The power has failed and my generator is still crook (a toasted control board) so I told the boys to take the battery from the Toyota and hook it up to the inverter so we can at least have TV and internet.  

No car keys.  Where are my car keys?   I always leave them in the same place, where are they?  We called the maid.  She is a very tidy maid.  Disarray annoys her so she has a jar.  Anything small and loose, left lying around that might still be important, she puts into the jar, and then puts the jar into her cupboard.  I have been sick with Malaria for over three days so my car keys qualified for the archive.  

'Jo', I told my maid, 'do you realise how serious the misplacement of car keys could be?'  Her blank expression encouraged me to pursue my point gently. 'Jo,' I said, 'had I just died of a heart attack, Marcia would need to get my body to the clinic ASAP so that she could catch the first post sending my death certificate to the insurance company in the morning.'  '

Oh,' Jo said.  

Marcia said, 'You have life insurance?'

Seriously, I am sick as a dog but I can rest easy knowing that access to the company bank accounts is secured in an impregnable jar.