When is a number not a number? When it is a PIN. Backstory: recently my bank overhauled its website. On the whole, it’s an improvement, but it hasn’t been entirely awesome. One of the changes was that special characters were no longer allowed in the security questions. As it turns out, that’s a good way to lock your users out. Me included.

Helpfully, if you lock yourself out, there’s a self-service unlock feature. You just need your Social Security Number and your PIN (and something else that I don’t recall at the moment). Like any good form, it validates the fields before proceeding. Except holy crap, if your PIN begins with 0, pressing “Submit” means the PIN field becomes three characters and you can never proceed. That’s right: it treats the PIN as an integer when really it should be a string.

I’ve made my share of dumb mistakes, so I try to be pretty forgiving. But bank websites need to be held to a very high standard, and this one clearly misses the mark. Breaking existing functionality and mistreating PINs are bad enough, but the final part that lead me to a polite-but-stern phone call was the fact that special characters are not allowed in the password field. This is 2016 and if your website can’t handle special characters, I have to assume you’re doing something terribly, terribly wrong.

In the meantime, I’ve changed my PIN.