Incompetence In Action

Prepare for a rant from me that's actually a bit more cynical than I usually am (yes, it's going to be that bad). I got a nice little letter from Wells Fargo while I was away. Seems they regret to inform me that a computer that contained a mortgage application of mine from 2002 with bunch of my information is missing, and may have been stolen. Lovely. So here's my question. I'm assuming the computer that was stolen (or misplaced) wasn't a mainframe. So why was my information on this computer? The info is from 2002, what the heck is it doing on a non mainframe computer at this point since I haven't had a mortgage with Wells Fargo for over a year? And how the heck did they know the computer that was stolen had my information on it. They have some centralized computer to track which computers have which pieces of information on them, but don't actually use the central computer for storage of that same data? Do they not actually have enough money for a mainframe and just have a ton of laptops sitting around with all the information from past applications on them? Suffice to say they aren't impressing me at this point.

They went on to assure me that everything is probably okay, since the computer had two layers of security on it. They don't mention what the security layers consists of though, so I'm betting one of those layers is just someone's login. And then it gets better. They don't mention when it was actually stolen (oh wait, I'm sorry, when it might have been stolen), but they delayed notifying people because they were afraid it would compromise the law enforcement's investigation. The fact that law enforcement is involved at all is enough reason in my mind to be able to give them crap for the use of "may" in describing whether the computer was stolen. And clue me in again on how telling people that their information was stolen is somehow going to jeopardize the actual catching of the crooks, because I'm not seeing it. So now they've decided that telling me will no longer jeopardize the investigation. My guess is it's now been so long they have no hope of recovering the computer, which to me says had they actually recovered it, they probably would have never mentioned this incident to me at all. But they still don't mentioned when they actually lost track of the computer. For all I know it could have been in 2002 and they're just now getting around to mentioning it.

In other news, Grammy and Nana are up so they can attend Catherine's dance recital tomorrow. I spent most of tonight mucking with Ginger's computer since it appears one of her drives is in the process of dying. So I was trying to copy as much data off of it as I could before it completely gives up the ghost. Then I had to sift through the registry entries and weed out any references to the bad drive letters. Real fun stuff there.