Liberated

The journey to Microsoft’s Reading campus that I took back in the early months of 2011 for one of the rounds of interviews I had before joining the organisation was one of the most stressful trips I have ever made. It wasn’t the prospect of three, one-hour interviews back-to-back that worried me (let’s be honest, the opportunity to talk about me for three whole hours? Bring it on!); it was stressful because at the point at which I hit the M3 motorway on my way out of South West London, two things happened almost simultaneously.

First of all, the fuel warning light came on on the car’s dashboard. And secondly, I suddenly realised that my wallet was in the pocket of the coat that I had decided not to wear that day.

Traffic was solid in the opposite direction, so a return back home would mean I would be late for the interviews. I had about two pounds in loose change on my person. The journey was a 60-mile round trip and the fuel light came on with 50-miles remaining.

In retrospect, this is the sort of “hard question” that organisations in the tech sector seem to revel in – you know the kind of thing; why are manhole covers round? and other stuff loved by the desperately logical. I seemed to be living out a role playing exercise in real life (maybe not for the first time in my life).

In the end it all resolved itself. A university chum of my wife’s worked at the Reading campus and was able to lend me some money before my interviews started so that I was, at the end of the third bout of questions, able to make light of the fact that my journey that morning had been a terrifying experience of wondering how I could gracefully ask to borrow some money in response to the interviewer’s inevitable final question of “Do you have any questions for me?”…

This morning, as I got into the London offices, I realised I’d done the same coat-swap wallet abandonment this morning. After calming down last time around I asked the question as to why, in the 21st Century, we still find ourselves tied to physical objects (ie bank cards) when in the virtual world it’s quite possible to make payments using services like PayPal without any real-world tokens present. This morning, bringing up the banking app on my smartphone, I was able to issue myself a six-digit PIN which I then used to withdraw £50 from the bank machines that lie Victoria offices. Card, as they say in the trade, not present.

There’s a lot of buzz at present as to how technologies like NFC (near field communication) built into the new crop of smart mobile devices will enable payment transactions. I still wonder why we need physical objects at all as part of payment mechanisms (it feels very tied to the old world of bartering sheep, to be honest) – but this morning was a nice indication of how the world of apps has allowed me to do something real and practical that I couldn’t have done 16 months ago.