By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

My life was simplified immensely when my dog walker agreed to use Venmo. No more checks and stamps or last-minute cash runs. Life was good.

Yesterday I did what I have done now on 30 previous Thursdays: I went into my Venmo app to pay her.

The app told me I needed to update my bank account. Ok. No problem. I felt as if I’d crossed some important technological threshold because my first impulse wasn’t to call my son. Gamely, I followed directions.

It wasn’t hard.  All I had to do was grant Venmo permission to instantly link to the bank account I had been using all along with a secure portal called “Plaid”.  Plaid, really?  Who names these things?  Trusting my life to Plaid didn’t seem like an especially good idea for me: I tend to fare better with solids.  If they were going to name a “secure portal” with a pattern or a color, couldn’t they have gone for something a little simpler and more definitive like black, as “in the black”?  

I liked the part of Plaid that suggested linkage would be instantaneous. Instantaneous felt like the right vibe for Venmo.  All Venmo has to sell is immediacy. Click, type, paid.   Unfortunately, it also feeds on distractibility.  On Venmo I can pay the dog walker while I’m stopped in the car, on the exercise bike, or on the toilet.   The upshot is that for me, single-focus tasks like reading The Times have turned into something of a slog.

Anyway, I should be grateful to Plaid.   It was secure, alright.  I used usernames, passwords, specially texted codes. And it was then, after getting my hopes up, that Plaid blocked me.  Its message was simple.   “Another user,” the message read, “is using this bank account”.

For a second, I panicked.  Who could this “other user” be; had I been hacked?  Given the security gymnastics I’d gone through to get to where I was, I suspected I knew who this “other user” was.  It was me.

I learned by scrolling through a few “help” articles that Venmo has very strict rules about more than one user accessing the same checking account.  Apparently, when the app asked me to update my bank account, it never figured I’d be “updating” the app with the account I was already using.

If logic is supposed to drive these algorithms, it clearly wasn’t working. The whole thing had clearly been devised by someone with the mathematical prowess of Donald Duck. And I’m not talking about myself.

I wondered why something that had been functioning perfectly well for months had suddenly needed an “update”.  It’s not as if when I throw in my whites, my washing machine refuses to do them without a special code.

Unwilling to be deterred, I shut off my phone and turned it on again.  This was obviously the tactic of a frustrated former English major; even I knew my phone had nothing to do with the recalcitrant Venmo app.

With nowhere else to turn, I filled out a support ticket on Venmo, explaining my problem and hit “send”. A few minutes later I heard from Anisha from the Venmo Support Team who advised me to send her a copy of my bank statement. What?

That’s when I finally called my son. “It’s okay, mom. As long as you know it’s actually Venmo, you’re fine.”

Oh right, I know I can trust my long-lost Cousin Venmo. When I told my son I wanted to get on the phone with a real-live person to get help, he told me it wasn’t necessary. They keep call centers really lean, he said. They expect you to do things over the Internet.

Well why shouldn’t they? This was Venmo, after all.

Ultimately I did call, and an agent named Devonne, convinced I was who I said I was, helped restore my original bank account to its rightful place.

I’m just glad that you still need a person to wrangle an app into shape.