I want to share a perfect failure scenario that happened to me and has been happening to me since April 2021. And yes, I see the world through the lens of a safety engineer – hate me for it if you must. The failure is 99% my fault for trusting a simple financial tool via my AMEX credit card.
This morning Becky alerted me to a repeated charge on my card for $8.61. It was for a Disney+ monthly membership – and you can rest assured I am not a user of Disney+, but I have two suspects in mind who do use Disney+. So I got to the Disney+ website to cancel the membership and to find out who the culprit was. Disney+ was far from helpful; you see, I am the cardholder paying for the account, but since I am not the account holder, they could not give me any of the info on the account so I could establish it was one of my suspects or someone in Bangladesh! I got the account canceled, but it troubled me as to why I was not getting this monthly charge in my text alerts. Turns out AMEX made a slight change, for reasons unknown, by raising the $ amount for any alert to… $10. So this $8.61 monthly charge was happening, and I never knew it. Now granted, as any safety professional knows – TRUST but verify by auditing! Too much reliance on a “system” without a means to verify that [safety] system is functioning as intended is a LATENT FAILURE setting the stage for my financial failures. The good news is I think AMEX will refund the entire amount based on the circumstances.
NEVER TRUST a “system” without validation that the system is working/functioning as intended!