My 10-year retrospective on trying SSRIs
In 2014 I got on SSRIs the first time, and they were amazing. I wrote online about how I suddenly had energy to do things, could concentrate on stuff, and generally just felt better and happier.
I now got a message from someone who’d found my writings and was wondering what my experience with antidepressants was now, 10 years later.
I wrote this reply to them, and thought I might as well share it with others:
—
Hi, that was indeed me!
I was on SSRIs for about a year after writing that comment, after that it felt like they started losing some of their effect but I also thought I felt better for other reasons, so I stopped using them. Then I was off them for about a year or two and started feeling bad again, so I got back on them. They had similar effects so I kept using them for a year, until I again got to the “I think they’re losing some effect and I’m also feeling better for other reasons” stage, so I again stopped them.
Eventually my old problems started coming back again, but I also started making more progress on those problems with therapy. By this time I had the feeling that even though the SSRIs were great, to some extent they suppressed my problems rather than solving them.
For example, deep down my self-esteem was still based on getting others to like me to an unhealthy extent – of course everyone wants to be liked, but *most* of the things I was doing had some undercurrent of “how could I get others to like me more this way”. The SSRIs didn’t really change that, but they shifted me from being very pessimistic about that ever working, to feeling more hopeful that “okay I just need to do this thing and then more people will like me”, and then I had more energy to keep doing things again. But the things that I was doing, still had an unhealthy obsessiveness going on.
Since then therapy-type approaches have helped me fix more of that underlying issue. (I had one particularly big breakthrough in 2017, which I described here, and a later follow-up to it here.)
I still struggle with some of my old problems – particularly anxiety, loneliness and occasional depression – but quite a lot of them have gotten better to the extent of being non-existent, e.g. my self-esteem is much better and on more healthy ground these days.
On a few occasions when I’ve had particularly rough patches I’ve tried antidepressants again, most recently for a brief period last year, but they don’t seem to have the same effect anymore. Maybe I could have just increased the dose, but I was afraid that that’d make it harder to access the core of the problems therapeutically, if the SSRIs ended up burying it deeper.
I’m still very glad that I originally got on them though, since they viscerally showed me that life could be much better and gave me hope!
One thing worth noting is that at some point, the level of physical pleasure I experience from orgasms seemed to have dropped quite a bit. I’m not entirely sure when exactly that happened – I was single for a while, and then at one point when I got into a relationship again, I noticed that sex with my next partner didn’t feel as satisfying as it did with my previous one (and this never recovered), so the decline must have happened sometime between those two relationships.
I can’t know for sure that it was caused by the SSRIs, but a long-term loss of sexual pleasure is a known side effect and the timing would roughly match. Another side effect that I got, that persisted even after I stopped using them, is grinding teeth at night (but I got a mouth guard from a dentist that prevents the worst off it). Personally I feel like these side effects were worth it – I was really, really badly off when I got on the meds – but I could easily imagine someone feeling differently, if they weren’t equally miserable.
Games of My Childhood: The Troops
The Troops (Finnish “joukot”, could also be translated as “the armies” or “the forces”) was a game of pretend that I played the most with my friend Eero; I believe Aleksi also joined in.
The central premise was that each time that you played a video game and killed, recruited, rescued, built, or otherwise destroyed/obtained an enemy, character, or unit in that game, it went into an alternate dimension where it became loyal to you. In other words, it joined your troops in that dimension. The same was true for buildings that you built or destroyed, equipment that you found or bought, cities that you conquered, etc..
This meant that whenever we were playing a game, we were not just playing a game: we were also accumulating resources that persisted between games. We could also combine resources from different games. For example, I might kill a number of soldiers in a game such as Snake’s Revenge on the NES, and then produce a number of laser rifles in a game such as X-Com for the PC. I could then decide that the soldiers I’d gotten from Snake’s Revenge were now armed with the laser rifles from X-Com, making them significantly tougher.
At first, my and Eero’s troops were separate, and we would occasionally trade units. For example, he had beaten the game Star Wars on the NES and destroyed a Death Star; I had beaten the game Snake’s Revenge and destroyed a Metal Gear, a walking robot armed with nuclear missiles. We agreed to trade one of his Death Stars for one of my Metal Gears. He later commented with amusement that this was probably not a great deal for him, given how much more powerful a Death Star is.
I took these trades seriously. Once, I traded a number of tanks from the NES game Top Gun: The Second Mission for something that I’ve forgotten. After we had already agreed on this trade, I became worried – exactly how many tanks had I destroyed while playing Top Gun? I wasn’t sure if I actually _had_ as many tanks as I had agreed to give to Eero. So then I had to load up the game and start destroying tanks in it, until I was sure that I had at least as many as I had agreed to trade. This clashed against my bedtime, but when I explained the situation to my mom, she somehow agreed to let me play until I had satisfied my objective (though I’m not sure if she really understood what it was all about).
Different games had different scales, which was an obvious problem. Unlike me, Eero wasn’t very much into strategy games. He complained that it wasn’t particularly fair that in a strategy game, you might acquire lots of units such as tanks at the click of a button, while in an action game you might need to spend a lot of time fighting them one by one.
I agreed that this wasn’t fair. But I still wanted to keep the units that I got from the strategy games. I thought that as compensation, units acquired from strategy games would be weaker than corresponding units acquired from action games. How much weaker? Compared to action game units, strategy game units would be able to take one less hit from the weakest weapon in _any_ video game.
Of course this was a ridiculous “weakness” that wasn’t actually any compensation at all. So I’m not sure if I actually ever told Eero of this compensation, since he would obviously have objected. It can be that I just thought of it in my head and figured the matter settled that way, even while feeling slightly guilty about it.
We both knew a bit about programming and used QBASIC to make simple text adventures. By mutual agreement, it was forbidden to just make your own game where you could kill 99999999999999999999 planets at the click of a button, or whatever. However, any units or resources gained from “real” games while using cheat codes or the Game Genie cheating device still counted, because we did cheat a lot and liked to keep those resources. Though I suggested a special case where, if you used a cheat code to instantly create resources from thin air, those didn’t count. I think this was mostly for the Heroes of Might and Magic II cheat code that instantly gave you 5 black dragons, which felt a bit too cheap even for me.
There were some other special case rules too. I think that unique named characters (such as Grand Admiral Thrawn from the PC game Star Wars: Rebellion) could only join your troops once, even if you played the game multiple times. But more generic “unique” units, like the end boss of a particular level, could be acquired many times if they didn’t have very much of a unique personality specified. I think the intent here was just something like, would it feel weird if there were several instances of a particular unit running around? Having several Grand Admiral Thrawns running around would feel weird. But having several different Killer Moth assassins (a level boss from the Batman game for the NES) would not feel weird, we could just think of them as generic Killer Moth assassins. However, troops belonging to different people could each have their own copies of Grand Admiral Thrawn.
Any units acquired directly from a game would always be completely loyal to us, even if that game had some kind of loyalty mechanic where units could become traitors. However, once they were a part of our troops, some of them might have children together. Any children born this way would _not_ be automatically loyal, but would just have their views and loyalties determined by normal psychological factors.
I think it was also so that any units or technology acquired from a game would not need active maintenance or food, but anything that was separately built or otherwise created by our troops would require it.
Eventually me and Eero agreed to join our troops together, so we no longer needed to trade and any games we played would benefit both. (I don’t think we ever thought about what happened to overlapping unique characters when we merged our troops. Possibly they got merged, too.) This led to a common joke when playing a game together – “what use will our troops have for X”, where X was some silly thing that really only made sense within the context of that particular game, or was obviously very underpowered. Later we also merged our troops with those of Aleksi; we also explained this thing to a few other kids in our neighborhood and asked if they wanted to join their troops to ours, and they agreed. This was often an easy gain, since they weren’t actually invested in our game so they might just say “oh okay whatever”, and then we’d have everything from the video games they played.
One kid who we did _not_ join our troops together with was a particular boy who was a bit of a bully. Neither of us liked him very much. Instead, we thought of different ways in which we would attack his troops and completely destroy them. (We never told him about this game nor about the fact that we were destroying his troops within that game, but rather just kept our revenge to ourselves.) I forget most of the different ways in which we destroyed him – nuclear missiles might have been involved in one – but at one point we decided that he had rebuilt his surviving forces in an underwater base. I remember the mental image of us sending submarines to that underwater base and shooting torpedoes right through its windows, destroying it as well.
The scale issue from strategy games caused some other conceptual issues as well. The original idea was that everything we acquired from games, we collected into a single enormous base on a massive planet where the units from everyone’s games went. But what about strategy games like Master of Orion II or Star Wars Rebellion, where you could get entire planets from? Or for that matter games like Civilization II, that would give you cities? I don’t think I ever reached a fully satisfying answer to this question, and instead just concluded that those planets and cities were located “somewhere else” in the Troop Dimension, outside the Main Planet.
I also remember thinking about the fact that different games clearly had different laws of physics (or different laws of magic). How would e.g. technology from two different sci-fi games with different underlying physics work, if they were both brought to the same dimension? The answer I settled on was that each unit would basically create its own pocket universe that moved with it. So that the laws of that universe applied to that unit while laws of other universes applied to other units. I also had some thoughts about how damage by weapons from different universes would be converted to a common scale, but I don’t remember what I concluded about this.
Finally, we ourselves could also travel to the dimension where our troops were located. I don’t think we made much use of this, but I did have a text document where I had compiled a list of various equipment that I personally carried with me while in the Troop Dimension. Some items included various magic items from Might & Magic VI, a portable shield generator from X-Com Apocalypse, a lightsaber from a QBasic “lightsaber creator” program I’d written (slightly bending the prohibition on text adventure gains here), as well as a plasma pistol from either Fallout 2 or the original X-Com. Had to be ready to defend myself, after all.
Indecision and internalized authority figures
A trauma book I was reading had an interesting claim that indecision is often because the person looks for the approval of an internalized authority figure (the writer is a Jungian therapist so attributed it to looking for the approval of an internalized parent, but I think it can be broader) but is unable to predict what action they would approve of.
I feel like that has some intuitive truth to it, in that when I don’t care about anyone’s opinion (or if nobody ever finds out) then it’s much easier to just pick one action and commit to it even if it might go badly. But one of the main reasons why I might struggle with that is if I fear that anyone would judge me for doing things incorrectly.
Or it can be a conflict between different internalized authority figures. “If I do this then X will be angry at me but if I do the other thing, then Y will be angry at me”. Or just the expectation that X will be angry at me no matter what I do.
This also reminds me of the way I think a big part of the appeal of various ideologies and explicit decision-making systems is that they give people a clear external ruleset that tells them what to do. Then if things go wrong, people can always appeal (either explicitly or just inside their own mind) to having followed The Right Procedure and thus being free of blame.
The most obvious external example of this is people within a bureaucracy following the rules to the letter and never deviating from them in order to avoid blame. Or more loosely, following what feels like the common wisdom – “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”.
But those are examples of people trying to avoid blame from an existing, external authority. I think people also do a corresponding move to avoid blame from internalized authority figures – such as by trying to follow a formalized ethical rule system such as utilitarianism or deontology.
Of course, if the system is one that easily drives people off a cliff when followed (e.g. extreme utilitarianism demanding infinite self-sacrifice), this isn’t necessarily helpful. Now what was supposed to give relief from the pressures of constant inner judgment, turns into a seemingly-rigorous proof for why the person has to constantly sacrifice everything for the benefit of others.
At one point I also wondered why it is that being very confident about what you say makes you very persuasive to many people. Why should it work that you can hack persuasiveness in that way, regardless of the truth value of what you’re saying?
Then I realized that extreme confidence signals social power since others haven’t taken you down for saying clearly wrong things (even if you are saying clearly wrong things). And that means that siding with the person who’s saying those things also shields others from social punishment: they’re after all just doing what the socially powerful person does. And given that people often project their internalized authority figures into external people – e.g. maybe someone really is trying to avoid their father’s judgment, but when seeing someone very confident they see that person as being their father – that allows them to avoid internalized blame as well.
Links and brief musings for June
Links in English
Schrödinger’s Ursula
Apparently the concept of Schrödinger’s cat got popularized thanks to Ursula Le Guin.
Schrödinger originally invented the cat image as a gag. If true believers in quantum mechanics are right that the microworld’s uncertainties are dispelled only when we observe it, Schrödinger felt, this must also sometimes happen in the macroworld – and that’s ridiculous. Writing in a paper published in 1935 in the German-language journal Naturwissenschaften (23 807), he presented his famous cat-in-a-box image to show why such a notion is foolish.
For a while, few paid attention. […] there were no citations of the phrase “Schrödinger’s cat” in the literature for almost 20 years. […] The American philosopher and logician Hilary Putnam (1926–2016) first learned of Schrödinger’s image around 1960. […] In his 1965 paper “A philosopher looks at quantum mechanics” Putnam called it “absurd” to say that human observers determine what exists. But he was unable to refute the idea. […]
It was to be another decade before the cat and its bizarre implications jumped into popular culture. In 1974 Le Guin published The Dispossessed (1974), an award-winning book about a physicist whose new, relativistic theory of time draws him into the politics of the pacifist-anarchist society in which he lived. […] she read up on relativity theory to make her character’s “theory of simultaneity” sound plausible.
Le Guin, it appears, seems to have read Putnam’s article in about 1972. “The Cat & the apparatus exist, & will be in State 0 or State 1, IF somebody looks,” Le Guin wrote in a note to herself. “But if he doesn’t look, we can’t say they’re in State 0, or State 1, or in fact exist at all.” […]
In “Schrödinger’s cat”, which Le Guin finished in September 1972 but didn’t publish for another two years, an unnamed narrator senses that “things appear to be coming to some sort of climax”. […] Le Guin’s story was soon followed by other fictional and non-fictional treatments of quantum mechanics in which Schrödinger’s cat is a major figure. Examples include the Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy (Robert Anton Wilson, 1979); Schrödinger’s Baby: a Novel (H R McGregor, 1999); Schrödinger’s Ball (Adam Felber, 2006); Blueprints of the Afterlife (Ryan Budinot, 2012).
Parenting advice
Thing of Things: Non-Parents Give Crappy Parenting Advice. Ways in which the common thought of “I’ve been a child so I can give good parenting advice” is misleading:
Children change radically over time, and it’s very easy to assume that if something was good six months ago it’s also good now. Therefore, many people remember chafing at particular rules or feeling patronized by particular ways of talking—but those rules or ways of talking were completely appropriate for them when they were younger, their parents just failed to change strategies quickly enough. However, because of childhood amnesia, those people don’t remember being younger, and therefore assume that the rules are naturally too strict or the way of talking naturally patronizing.
Even if you have an opinion about an age you remember well, you might have forgotten other important details. I spent many years wondering why on earth my mother dragged me to so many activities I hated when I regularly had screaming, crying, miserable meltdowns about how much I hated them. “How hard is it to notice that your screaming, crying child doesn’t want to do that allegedly fun thing?” I thought.
And then I had a child. I realized that small children—at least ones with my genes—melt down a lot. They melt down because a situation is unfamiliar, or a plan changed, or they misunderstood something, or they’re just tired and grouchy. I didn’t remember all meltdowns of that sort I had, because they didn’t make a huge impression on me. I remembered being forced to do things I hated, but not all the times I had an equally dramatic response before being introduced to something I really loved. […]
Of course, you should also refrain from taking your child to fun activities they actually hate. But figuring out which is which is hard and requires good judgment, and it’s easy to err in both directions—something I didn’t appreciate before I had a child.
Further, when a person with little experience of children gives parenting advice, she’s generalizing from the experiences of one person—herself. […] all kinds of completely normal people assume that, if they would have liked to be treated a particular way as a child, all children would like to be treated that way.
Children are as diverse as adults. Some thrive on schedule and routine; others prefer it when things are more flexible. Some are anxious and frightened; others are reckless and fearless. Some love trying new foods; others would prefer a diet of buttered pasta and white bread. Some thirst for knowledge; others would rather do nothing but play Minecraft. […] You might generalize from your experiences of your friends, but remember that your friends tend to be like you. Advice that works great for a bright, driven, curious child works poorly for a child who is slow in school and unmotivated to learn. […]
Finally, a lot of non-parents aren’t really aware of the constraints that parents are under. […] I promise you, no parent is happy about their baby crying on an airplane. […] Even if you’re the best and most empathetic and most devoted parent in the world, sometimes your baby will cry and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. […]
Similarly: my child is running around the BART station because they need to get their energy out somehow or we’re all going to have a bad time; my child is watching a noisy YouTube video because my phone doesn’t have a headphone jack and it was this or a meltdown; my child is crying in the grocery store because I was three-quarters of the way through checking out when they saw the Skittles and I just want to be done […] I think some childfree people don’t quite realize that their preferred norms for children’s behavior amount to “children shouldn’t be allowed to leave the house at all.”
Secret languages
there is a “secret language” spoken by children and animals that uses the whole body as a way to send signals, this language is nonverbal and vibes-based, it’s emotional, felt, and intuitive. […]
one claim of the “pre-contact consciousness” model is that humans used to communicate very deeply like this, and then the norms broke down somewhere and people lost the ability to perform this felt dialog. They learned to distrust the channel and ignore what it said to them.
[…] that channel still exists, it didn’t go anywhere, and it still contains a ton of information being transmitted creature to creature, below the level of actual dialogue, often in a state of intense contradiction with what someone says with words.
An example is someone saying “I’m fine” in a way that is obviously not fine. Or insisting they’re okay with something their body is obviously not okay with. The social reality expectation is that you take people on their literal words, even when you observe this contradiction.
And people will take advantage of that, ignoring obvious things on that emotional channel, “well she didn’t SAY she didn’t want it”, that’s only true if you ignore the sublinguistic channel and only look at the literal words, but isn’t doing that awfully convenient?
And then once something IS made legible in english, it can be argued about and it’s fair game for ‘convincing’ them that they’re wrong, that they’re confused about their felt sense, or that it’s irrational and should be ignored. guys do this ALL THE TIME.
Some of it is actually emotional illiteracy or dissociation from one’s felt senses, but not all of it is, and people do use that claim of unseeing as a way to intentionally ignore those signals when you can plausibly say you just didn’t notice them. […]
Being around people who can interact with this channel feels really nice and safe, it lets you feel seen.
converse, being around someone who is unable to see this channel, or who is actively ignoring it, feels like they’re ignoring you, or that you’re invisible to them and the only thing they can see is words from a disembodied ghost, and it doesn’t feel safe or secure. […]
i absolutely don’t think people should ignore the verbal component of communication, or pick one channel over the other, but to notice when they are contradicting and (eheh) delve deeper into their state
Important
David R. MacIver – This is important.
You were born with wings.
This doesn’t make you special. Everyone was born with wings. This is normal.
You see small children flying about sometimes. Their parents smile tolerantly. It’s perfectly normal, children do that.
They don’t show their children how to fly better though. Instead, they teach them how to walk.
Adults don’t fly you see. Oh, maybe some do. Artists and degenerates, maybe. But it’s childish. We’ve outgrown that.
You are no different to anyone else. You have wings, but you don’t fly.
It’s hard to fly you see. It was easy as a child, but children are small and light.
As an adult, you are weighed down by your larger adult body, and there isn’t really room. You live in the city, with high walls and lines above-head. You’d hurt yourself if you tried to fly. Where would you even start?
Your wings haven’t been used in so long, they’re weak and flabby. You doubt they could support your weight even if you let them.
But they itch. They know what they’re for, and they want to be used.
You talk about this with your friends and colleagues.
“Oh yes,” they say. “I remember when I was young and thought flying was the greatest thing ever. But I’ve outgrown that. These days I’ve got both feet on the ground, too many responsibilities to be flighty don’t you know. Ha ha.”
Everything but the laugh sounds sincere.
You talk about it some more, and are reliably informed that it’s impossible for an adult to fly, that it would be too much work, that it wouldn’t be worth it even if you could.
You don’t believe them.
So one day, you leave the city, and find a nice empty space to try to fly in. You stretch your wings, you jump… and you fall.
Your wings haven’t been used in so long, they’re weak and flabby. They can’t support your weight even if you want them to.
But that? That is just a problem. You can solve it.
It takes you less time than you think. You find ways to stretch your wings and strengthen them without flying. You watch videos, you read instructions, you get the basics down.
You go back out there every week, and you practice your running jumps, your glides.
And then, one day, you catch the wind just right, and you soar. The sublime arrives as you head skywards. It stays as you crash down to the earth.
Because this was just a first success. You barely flew, but you flew. And now you’ve done it once, you can do it again. Better.
I am trying to show you that you have wings. Rise.
[if you liked this, see the whole article for more of the same]
Why not unschool
Kelsey Piper on reasons not to unschool.
I know a lot of parents who unschool – homeschool with no curriculum or set goals for what the kids learn, in favor of the kids learning whatever interests them. It’s popular among people who care a lot about not coercing children unnecessarily and people who are often really thoughtful about children’s independence and happiness, so I take it pretty seriously, and some people have asked me why we’re not doing that.
Broadly, we’re not unschooling because adults I talked to who were unschooled often had very mixed feelings about it, I think as often implemented it ends up limiting kids’ freedom by making it hard for them to access some methods of learning, and because the culture around unschooling that I ran into bothered me in various ways.
(much more behind the link)
Musings in English
Survey answers
In 2017 I was putting down important information in surveys.
The survey had more than one of these fields.
Litany against stones
I’m sure I’m not the first one to think of this, but it occurred to me that the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear is also applicable to kidney stones:
I will face my kidney stone.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the stone has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Incidentally, it seems like I had my first one ever in early June. I count myself lucky since it was a relatively mild one, meaning that the pain only ranged from “unpleasant but bearable” to “has me on the floor basically immobilized”. Still, this is one achievement that I could’ve gone without unlocking.
In The Beginning
Conversation elsewhere got me to look up what the illustrious and awe-inspiring start of my blogging career was
Behold
The Buddha and friendship
The Buddha on how to treat your friends; this seems like a nice set of principles:
There are five ways in which a man should minister to his friends and companions as the northern direction: by gifts, by kindly words, by looking after their welfare, by treating them like himself, and by keeping his word. And there are five ways in which friends and companions, thus ministered to by a man as the northern direction, will reciprocate: by looking after him when he is inattentive, by looking after his property when he is inattentive, by being a refuge when he is afraid, by not deserting him when he is in trouble, and by showing concern for his children.
(From DN 31: Sigālaka Sutta, reprinted in “In the Buddha’s Words“)
Two types of Buddhist texts
Social engineering
Feeling like a clever social engineer because my gym was like “would you like this special offer to renew your membership more cheaply, only available for a limited time, respond by Monday if you want it” and then I missed the first email about it and only saw their reminder late during Monday
And then I finally got around emailing them around half an hour after the deadline with a “hey I missed the deadline by half an hour but could I still get this deal” knowing that of course I would, these kind of limited-time things are basically fake and no salesperson would miss their chance to make a sale because of enforcing an arbitrary deadline
All the while also thinking about the way that “make your mark think that they’re being so clever by cheating the conman” is by itself a classic element in a con and the end result of this “clever social engineering” was just that… they got me to do what they wanted me to do in the first place
But whatever, I’ll still feel clever about it anyway
(Oh and yes they did agree to give me the deal despite me missing the deadline)
The notifications you get these days
Suomeksi / Links and musings in Finnish
Pelottavan hyvä tietojenkalasteluyritys
Minulle soitti päivällä mies Omalainasta. Kertoi, että lainahakemukseni on hyväksytty, ja lainasumma voitaisiin maksaa minulle jo saman päivän aikana. Halusi puhelinsoitolla vielä varmistaa, että on varmasti oikea hakemus kyseessä, koska laina oli määrätty maksettavaksi toisen henkilön tilille, nimi oli Ahmed- jotakin.
Sanoin, etten ole hakenut mitään lainaa. Mies vaikutti hämmästyneeltä, ja sanoi että 8500 euron lainan hakemiseen oli tunnistauduttu minun pankkitunnuksillani. Kysyi olinko klikkaillut linkkejä tai olisivatko tunnukseni päässeet muuta kautta jonkun toisen käyttöön.
Kielsin, koska näissä asioissa olen mielestäni varsin tarkka. Mies pahoitteli ja kertoi, että olen ilmeisesti kuitenkin joutunut rikoksen kohteeksi. Sanoi, että minun kannattaisi ottaa nyt viipymättä yhteyttä pankkiini, jotta he selvittävät kuinka paljon tunnuksiani on jo käytetty ja pääsisin tekemään rikosilmoituksen. Kysyi asiointipankkini ja lupasi kääntää puhelun sinne heti. Pyysi minua kirjoittamaan ylös lainahakemusnumeron, jota voivat pankissa kysyä.
Puhelu kääntyi, ja odotin hetken. Danskebankista vastasi nainen, joka kysyi kyseisen lainahakemusnumeron ja kertoi, että näitä tapauksia oli nyt ollut valitettavan paljon. Ilmeisesti jossakin oli tapahtunut tietovuoto ja he selvittelevät asiaa. Hänen mukaansa nimissäni oli tehty myös toinen lainahakemus Norwegian Bank tms. nimissä. Aikoi nämä peruuttaa.
Kysyin, pitääkö minun nyt toimia jotenkin, ja hän suositteli että pankkitunnukset kannattaa varalta sulkea ja tilata uudet. Hän lupasi sulkea tunnukset heti ja sanoi että tarvitsee käyttäjätunnukseni, minkä jälkeen minun tulisi vahvistaa tunnistautumiseni Danske ID- tunnuksella.
Tässä vaiheessa sanoin, että en halua antaa tunnuksiani puhelimessa. Sanoin, että kirjaudun mielelläni itse ensiksi omaan pankkiini ja asioin sen kautta. Virkailija oli ymmärtäväinen ja sanoi, että voin hoitaa asian toki myös niin, mutta minun olisi toimittava viipymättä. Sanoin, että teen niin, en anna tunnuksiani puhelimessa. Nainen lupasi laittaa uudet tunnukset tulemaan expresspostina, niin homma olisi sitten nopea hoitaa konttorissa. Päätin puhelun siihen.
Soitin Danskebankiin. Ja niinhän se oli, että tämä on taas yksi uusi tapa huijata ja kalastella pankkitunnuksia. Kukaan ei ollut käyttänyt tunnuksiani yhtään mihinkään, eikä nimissäni oltu haettu lainoja. Pankin asiakaspalvelijat eivät kysy koskaan asiakkaiden käyttäjätunnuksia. Jos puhelu vaatii tunnistautumista, se tapahtuu yleensä automaattitunnistuksessa puhelun alussa, silloin kun asiakas itse soittaa suoraan pankkiin.
Soitin myös Omalainaan. En ollut ainoa joka oli soitellut. Heille oli tullut lyhyen ajan sisällä yhteydenottoja useilta muiltakin, jotka eivät ole edes heidän asiakkaitaan. Minäkään en ollut. He toivoivat rikosilmoituksen tekemistä, jotta poliisikin kiinnostuisi. Harkitsevat sen tekemistä myös itse.
Tyks-joki
Jos turkulainen uskoo että Styks-virta erottaa tuonpuoleisen ja tämänpuoleisen, ovatko ne sitten tuol ja täl pual jokkee?
This work by Kaj Sotala is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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