PIN weirdness

Shannon and I recently got new debit cards in the mail from the bank. All you have to do is call the number, and you're good to go. They even explicitly state that your PIN will not change (note: you shouldn't say "PIN Number" because that means "Personal Identification Number Number" which would be dumb.) That would have been great, had it been true. Instead, we activated our cards, and found that they didn't work. And it's not like the bank was going to send us a new PIN, because we weren't supposed to need one. So, that's fixed by going to the bank, complaining, and waiting a week before you can shop again.

Now for another interesting PIN note. About 2 years ago, we got new cards and with them new PINs. My PIN changed from a number that I had picked and could remember, to something randomly assigned that I never liked much. And so I spent 2 years wanting a new number, yet not bothering to spend the time at the bank to change it. To make matters worse, here I was getting a whole new PIN, so even my randomly assigned PIN, which I'd at least gotten used to, wasn't going to work anymore. Well, as it turns out, when my new PIN arrived, it was the old PIN! I don't know if it was done on purpose, or if I just got randomly lucky, but the bank changed my PIN back to the old one that I'd been missing for the last two years! What are the odds of that? Exactly 1 in 10,000. Unless they did it on purpose, then the odds were unity. (Unity means 1)

(Maybe some day I'll make a whole post on the difference between 1 and unity. Yeah, I know I said they were the same thing, but they're really not. Unity is actually more specific. I'd tell you more, but that would be ruining a possible future post!)