Online bill-pay

For some time we have been using online bill-pay.
In fact, ever since we opened our new checking account a few years ago.
I like it, mainly because I’m instituting the bill-pays.
Not the payee.
That’s all I need, a payee instituting multiple bill-pays by mistake and overdrawing our account.
I’ve seen it happen.
A friend of mine trying to reverse multiple payments to pay back her college loan.
With some guy in India who could barely speak English from a public-relations prompt-book, baffled by her questions.
The multiple mistaken charges had overdrawn her account, triggering automatic bank penalties.
No; I’ll go it alone.
I don’t trust the SYSTEM.
If anything can go wrong, it will.
So I access our checking account online to institute bill-pays myself, and update our records.
I found myself locked out the other night.
“Next morning,” I said.
Still locked out the next day, so I called the bank.
“Did you recently update to FireFox-4?”
“Yes, I guess I did, actually.”
“FireFox-4 won’t accept our bank’s digital certificate. I hafta install a cookie.”
FireFox is my Internet browser. I gave up on Microsoft Internet-Explorer years ago.
BlogSpot suggested I switch to FireFox, plus there were elements that didn’t work with Internet-Explorer.
Plus I had an old college friend advocating I switch to FireFox, what he was using.
So I switched. Like Internet-Explorer it’s a free install.
Then the barrage began.
Every week or two I’d get an update from FireFox, all of which I’d dutifully install.
A few weeks ago I got an e-mail suggesting I install FireFox-4. I was using 3.8-or-9.something.
I held off.
Things were fine with what I had, and an earlier FireFox upgrade destroyed their “history” feature, what I use to keep about 10 tabs permanently open.
Then I recently got a FireFox upgrade message — sure, why not? I’d seen ‘em before.
“Congratulations. You’ve upgraded to FireFox-4.”
“Oh well, what the heck,” I thought to myself. “We’ll try it.”
All was hunky-dory over a week until I tried our bank.
Locked out, and no idea why.
Cookie installed, “We’ll try it,” I said — I was driving this here laptop while on the phone with the bank.
“Invalid user-name or password,” it said.
“Same one I used before.”
“Do you know your password?” the girl asked.
“Sure. Same as before,” I said.
“Here, try this......” She gave me a temporary password.
It let me log in, and thereafter I could reset my password back to what it was.
“What was the name of your first pet?”
“This some new angle?” I asked. “Password plus security-question to log in?”
“That’s the way it’s always been!”
“Not for me,” I said. “No security-question before.
That’s no problem, as long as it’s lettin’ me log in.”
Logged in, I set up a natural-gas bill-pay, and updated our records.