When it comes to technology, I am of two distinct opinions: I love it and I hate it.
I especially dislike it when it makes me feel old and out of touch with the times. Case in point: my first encounter with Venmo. Venmo, you ask? What’s that? Yes, my point exactly. But then, sometimes your initial reaction can turn out to be spot on.
Let me back up a step. For the third time in her life, our firstborn is living out in the San Francisco Bay area. The first time was in 1990, since she was born in our beautiful city by the bay. The second time was two years ago, when she went to work for a startup out of college. Now she’s moved back to take on a new job at a company that was once a startup but is now up and running nicely.
After one week, she had found an apartment. This was amazingly great news. The bad news: instead of the first month and security deposit she had anticipated she would need to move in, her landlord was asking for first AND last month in addition to the security. In short, she was short. By about a thousand dollars.
Help! Enter M&D Bank (aka the bank of Mom and Dad.) “It’s easy,” she told us. “You can Venmo it to me.” “I didn’t understand what you said, sweetie,” I said over my iPhone (now there’s a piece of technology I love.) “Venmo, mom, it’s a digital payment system. Everybody uses it.”
This is an example of when I can actually hate technology: when I’m told “everyone” is doing something and I’ve never heard of it. Of course, there might be some exaggeration involved. “I’ve never heard of Venmo,” I explained patiently to my child, “so it’s difficult for me to believe that — quote — everybody’s using it.”
Venmo, according to its online description, is a “free digital wallet that lets you make and share payments with friends. You can easily split the bill, cab fare, or much more.”
The “much more,” in this case, was to help with an apartment move-in, and according to our millennial on the ground in the Technology Capital of the World — this was the way quote — everyone in town was paying rent — and in fact, this was her landlord’s preferred method of payment moving forward.
So there we were on a Friday night, when both Bill and I are tired from the week and want nothing more to think about than what show to catch On Demand, getting walked through the Venmo app download process by our daughter.
I took the first stab. I immediately ran into a problem. The app was asking me to connect to my bank account and it also wanted me to give up my birthday and social security number. “I’m totally not good with this,” I grumped. “This is a scenario ripe for identity theft.”
The other alternative was to link my bank account and the Venmo app through Facebook, also a problem since I recently had deleted Facebook from my phone.
“Bud!” I hollered to my hubby, “You’re up!” He successfully downloaded the app. He also connected through Facebook. But then, he also hit a snag. When he tried to link our bank account, the app turned him down, telling him that account already was in use.
Proud of myself for being clever, I said, “Fine, I’ll simply delete not just our bank account but the entire app from my phone.” It still didn’t work. Meanwhile, there was our child, waiting patiently 3,000 miles away, counting on mom and dad to swoop in and save her from homelessness.
A light bulb went off in my head. “What about your other account,” I asked said-child’s father. Yes, I knew about his secret fund — actually just a temporary account he had set up for a deposit (small) last year. So Bill set up the transfer and Katie got a message from Venmo saying the “agreed upon amount” had successfully been added to her bank account. Problem solved and two exhausting and stressful hours later, we called it a night.
Brrring! The home phone rang early the next morning. Never a good sign. It was Katie, worried that her check would bounce. Now Venmo was telling her that the funds would not be available for another three days. Long story short: I went to the bank and transferred the money instantaneously the old-fashioned way — by wire. Problem solved.
Just this week, Time magazine had an interesting article titled “The Scary Thing You Don’t Understand About Venmo.”
It reads: “Millennials love Venmo, and for good reason. The PayPal-owned app provides a frictionless way for friends to pay one another without ever touching cash.”
The scary part? “Many people seem to think Venmo cash transfers happen instantly. They don’t. And sometimes (strangers) take advantage of this misunderstanding to perpetrate fraud.”
I rest my case. My trepidation about signing up for this new app had not been unfounded. With anything, but especially new technology, buyer beware.
This little episode did come with a silver — or rather, green — lining for Katie. She had received the emergency cash transfer from Mom immediately. Ka-ching! The Venmo cash transfer from Dad went through three days later. Ka-Ching again!
“Bud, are we going to make her pay us back?” asked mom. “No, it will be good for her to have a buffer,” said dear, sweet dad. Thanks, Dad. Thanks a lot, Venmo.
