The financial industry runs on technology, some quite entrenched, but it cannot always remove the problems related to running a bank or other company. A recent banking encounter illustrates this paradox quite well.

Like many other business people, I use several banks, chosen for various attributes including how close they are to my home and office, which offer the best rates and which offer other various services. For the most part, I work with each bank individually but make many payments from one bank to another, using checks.

In November, I noticed a mistake on my checking account statement with Bank A.

A check I had written to myself showed up on my statement off by one dollar. Bank B, the bank in which I deposited the check, had credited the proper amount to my other account. So the two banks showed different amounts.

On the surface, it seemed simple. After all, it was only one dollar. But I found that the error kept me from reconciling my checkbook with QuickBooks, because my QuickBooks software was tied to the bank's account records online.

No problem, I thought. I'll call Bank A and have them correct it. But instead of it being corrected, I received a letter telling me that I should contact the other bank. I took this as being a letter of: "We really don't want to deal with it, so let's point our finger to the other company."

Six months later, and the situation is still not resolved. Bank A tells me to have Bank B fix it; Bank B says I have to go to Bank A. I've escalated the problem two levels above branch manager and still no resolution. Apparently the personnel in neither bank understands how the funds actually get transferred.

Yet the mistake is easy to pinpoint. The Magnetic Ink Character Recognition encoding -- those characters on the bottom edge of your check that remind you of 1960s computer font -- doesn't match what is written on the check. So the machines that process the interbank transaction think the check is written for a different amount than has really been written -- and that one measly dollar mistake throws the whole reconciliation off.

The telephone support people for Bank B haven't even heard of MICR encoding. When I pressed the rep to check with her supervisor, she did -- and several minutes later advised me that she couldn't find a single supervisor who had heard of it.

With the millions of transactions that flow through Bank B annually, I'm shocked that nobody has ever told the support reps about MICR -- especially since it has been in use since 1956, and according to Wikipedia, almost universally in use since 1963.

After six months, I finally found one branch person this week who could define for me which bank puts the MICR on the check -- it's the bank that receives the check to deposit (in this case Bank B) -- and the process to fix a problem. According to her, it would be to contact the bank on which the check was drawn (Bank A), and have that bank's research department contact Bank B so Bank B can fix it. So I still have hope.

Over the years, I have received complaints from banking people about the poor support they get from Internet and software companies. Yet their own industry has similar problems despite having many more years to work out the bugs.