As a hard core user of cloud software and services, in literally every area of my life, I likely see or notice many things that other people don’t. I often feel that I have the rare ability to consistently jam or break things that should be working for millions, if not tens of millions, of people.

I am also an intense person that tries to accomplish a lot every single day so when something that is supposed to work smoothly doesn’t I get very frustrated and try to look for the logic as to why it isn’t.

Yesterday was a great example of this. I was on Bank of America’s online banking doing payroll for our development team in Colombia. Every month on the 15th I send a number of international wires there. I toggle between Quickbooks Online, where our transactions are recorded, and BofA’s online wire screen to enter and send each transaction individually.

The process usually moves along quickly from wire to wire and I am generally done in 15 minutes or so. About five wires into the process I attempt to do a wire that is above a certain dollar amount and BofA prompts me to text a Safe Pass Code to my cell phone. This is usually just one click to send the code and then one more second extra to enter the six digit code and then press send as usual; not a big deal.

I enter the wire details and click send to get my Safe Pass Code. I immediately pick up my cell phone to retrieve the number. Weird, the text message does not pop in. I click on the Messages app on my Mac desktop and don’t see the text there either. I go back and resend the message to try and start over but on the second and third attempt still nothing. Already my blood is starting to boil.

I find a phone number online for BofA to call their support. Luckily I operate with two iPhones (the X and the SE) so I can call from my secondary phone while leaving the primary open to receive the text. I dial in and get placed into a series of on hold advertisements from BofA partners. First it’s a roadside service offer. After listening to the offer I press # to pass, then comes home security, # to pass again. After listening to about six offers it seemed as if this would never end. Now I am practically floating out of my chair in anger. I try to collect my rage and hang up to start over.

I go into Google Contacts and pull up the BofA support number for business customers. I dial in a second time and after entering my account number the system tells me that it will be a 12 to 15 minute hold or I can leave my number to get a call back. I am fuming. I leave my number and luckily enough about 15 minutes later their system calls me back and I get a seemingly nice guy on the line that says he is in the BofA office in Tampa, FL. Now I have spent a lot of time in Tampa and I know the city well. With my blood still heated I am thinking this is how much money this company is making, their tech support agent is in the Bank of America Plaza building in Tampa. This is one of the nicest buildings that makes up the downtown Tampa skyline; a very expensive place to have phone support staff.

Before I can tell him what’s wrong he wants to send me a text message so I can confirm the code with him to validate me as a customer. I explain to him my that this is my exact issue and that at this point not being able to receive a simple text from them has my 15 minute routine of doing payroll now cutting into an hour out of my day. He apologizes and tells me he will send me an email to get me the code.

After we validate that he asks me to text the word HELP to a six digit number he gives me. I send the text but there is no auto response back. He doesn’t see anything wrong on their end and doesn’t have any logical answer as to why their software systems are not working properly so he tries to tell me that maybe BofA is not compatible with my carrier.

I explain to him that I have done this 100 times before and it always works. I then reminded him that I use Verizon and BofA and Verizon are both monopolies that rule the world and if their systems are not communicating properly maybe the world is coming to an end?

He chuckles and tries telling me maybe short code messages have been disabled on my phone and that I should contact my carrier. Great why don’t I just take the whole afternoon off and go stand in the Verizon store for a few hours. I wanted to rip through the phone and smash the guys head on my desk.

I explain to him that I have not changed any settings and have no reason to believe that short code texting would be disabled on my phone. He realizes he is out of answers so I catch my temper and deicide to let him off the hook. I said look I think I remember that this happened once before a long time ago. Your systems are probably experiencing a temporary glitch and I will give it a day and try again, if that doesn’t work I’ll contact my carrier. He says great and is happy to end the call.

Sure enough three to four hours later I get text blasted with four or five consecutive messages from BofA with random six digit codes that I no longer need. LOL, I guess their systems came back up. I returned to login again and received a new code and did the wire within two minutes with no problems.

The reality is that building and maintaining software, that we expect to run without fail, as part of our everyday lives is extremely challenging. I often realize that this is the case even for massive companies like Verizon and BofA.

What we are building at GLX is super sophisticated and I am guilty of being a perfectionist that is paying attention to details that other people will never likely notice. The result of this seems like it is hard to see our progress. I am positive that in the long run the sum of all of these minor details, that have been perfected, will add up to result in a superior product. I do not want to sacrifice that at any cost. Sometimes we need to take a deep breath and remember good things come to those who wait.

As a goof I found the article below that outlines some catastrophic software failures by massive companies in recent history:

• www.computerworlduk.com/galleries/infrastructure/top-software-failures-recent-history-3599618

The world is changing albeit very slowly. Sometimes you think we are in the digital age but then have to second guess yourself.

I returned from NYC this week and although I sit at my desk 12-hours a day working I have had a small stack of receipts and other paperwork from my trip at the edge of my desk that I have been afraid to rip into. I use a Neat desktop scanner that scans all my receipts to my Neat Cloud account so that I can save and access them. I also scan documents that I want to retain using the Neat scanner directly into Dropbox.

The first thing I did when I arrived back was check my physical mailbox in the lobby of my building. Of course it was stuffed with junk mail, coupons, flyers and other meaningless notices. Comcast even mails me offers for their internet service even though they are physically unable to do installs in our building. I have gone to various websites to submit my name and address to try and stop the madness but no matter how hard I try the paper keeps coming?

Every time someone hands me a business card or a big corporation tries to give me a folder of marketing materials, which I know will end up in the trash, I think about the overall effect this has on society at large. I always try politely to refrain from taking it. The world population has grown from 2.7 Billion in 1955 to almost 7.5 Billion people today. To accommodate all of these additional bodies we continue to cut down rainforests basically raping and pillaging the planet. It is sad to think that the air we breathe every day is getting worse because of this nonsensical waste. In a quick review to write this post I even found one article,  called “Rainforest destruction threatens to KILL US ALL, shock research finds”, that stated that deforestation is unearthing new and weird strains of infectious diseases which human beings have no way of fighting, including flesh eating diseases and even the Zika virus.

At GLX we have recently been organizing our shareholder records into a new database. This new database will be directly connected to member’s profiles in the GLX network within the near future for our beta launch. I was responding to an email from one of our biggest and most supportive shareholders about a couple of missing printed certificates. My first response was to write him that if he wanted the missing certs printed we would order them from our transfer agent immediately and have them physically delivered to him, which of course we will do. But then, as always, I stopped to think about how many processes in the global capital markets are dysfunctional and broken and how GLX can fix them.

I thought about a better way of making someone feel secure about their position while providing total transparency for record keeping. We have a Bitcoin trading account with Gemini. This is the Winklevoss twins regulated cryptocurrency exchange. We are going through our audits now and our CFO had requested statements for that account. I logged in and realized that no statements were available. Only the ability to export all of your detailed transaction history to a spreadsheet file. At first this seemed a little unorthodox and bit annoying then I gave it some further thought. The simplicity of it is brilliant. We live in a world where we still get over sized envelopes with quarterly statements, from dormant brokerage accounts with zero equity, in the mail likely because some regulator says they have to mail them to comply. Gemini has simply removed all the nonsense. You can log in anytime to view and export the history of your entire account.

GLX has already begun a strategic relationship to create a digital wallet, based on the blockchain. The wallet will be available on all devices as well as in a member’s profile when logged into our website. From here an investor will be able to view and export their entire transaction history.

If you Google the oldest stock certificate in existance you will find that it was a share of the Dutch East India Company in 1606 also that it looks similar to many stock certificates today, including GLX’s. GLX is going to redesign a futuristic stock certificate so that with one click an investor can download and save, or print, a PDF file certificate representing that particular ledger entry.

No more transfer agent’s, no more envelopes, no more stamps, no more lost time and lost mailings, who needs all that nonsense?

It has already been stated that the Blockchain is as profound an invention as the internet itself. Also that financial technologies and the Blockchain will dramatically change the capital markets, commercial banking and other industries as we know them today. When you have an extra 15-minutes here is a great video on living paperless – How living paperless could change your life | Dominic Stühler | TEDxBerlin.

I look forward to showing everyone how GLX will embrace and lead many of these changes.