Does the Woman Who Asks an Online Forum Before Calling Her Bank Really Exist?

Every now and then, I come across an online article that makes me want to say, “Wait, why would anyone do that?”

One I saw recently was about a woman who had accidentally transferred money to the wrong person.

Panicking after sending the money to the wrong recipient, she asked her husband what to do. He reportedly replied:

“You’ll be fine if you contact the bank.”

So far, so normal.

The problem came next.

The woman then asked an online forum:

“My husband says this, but is it really true?”

How should I know?

Forget whether you trust your husband. Call the bank right now.

If you make a mistaken transfer, the first thing to do is contact your financial institution and ask whether the transfer can be recalled. This is not the time to gather a jury of random strangers online to determine whether your husband was telling the truth.

At first, I thought, “There really are some remarkably laid-back people in this world.”

But after a while, another question occurred to me.

Does this woman even exist?

Once I considered that possibility, the whole story suddenly made much more sense.

What the writer probably wanted to produce from the beginning was an explainer on what to do after transferring money to the wrong account.

Contact the bank. Request a transfer recall. You may have to pay a fee. The recipient’s consent may also be required.

On its own, that would make a rather dull article.

So they introduce “someone who is actually in trouble.”

A wife who has transferred money to the wrong person.

A husband who gives her advice.

A wife who remains anxious and turns to the internet for help anyway.

Then the article responds:

“Your husband is right. The first thing you should do is contact your bank.”

And there you have it: an article that “empathetically addresses a reader’s problem.”

But because the story was bolted on afterward, it produced an absurd character.

A woman who realizes she has transferred money to the wrong person, is told by her husband to contact the bank, but instead of contacting the bank opens an online forum and asks whether her husband is right.

Rather than believing that someone like this really exists, it seems far more natural to assume she was invented to provide a setup for an explanation of transfer recalls.

The internet is full of these kinds of “personal stories.”

“My husband said this to me.”

“A friend told me something like this.”

“This kind of trouble happened at work.”

If a character’s behavior seems strangely unnatural, perhaps you should consider another possibility before worrying about that person’s intelligence.

Maybe that person never existed in the first place.

At first, I was exasperated by a woman who chose an online forum over her bank.

But when I think about it, I was also rather foolish, mentally shouting “Call the bank already!” at a fictional character.

Even more irritatingly, the oddness of it bothered me enough that I read the article all the way to the end.

From the writer’s point of view, in other words, it was a complete success.

The character does not need to exist. It does not matter if the story makes little sense. If the reader thinks, “Is this person an idiot?” and keeps reading to the end, that is one more page view.

Apparently, in the world of online articles, even if the story falls apart, there is no need for a recall as long as the reader takes the bait.