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Friday, October 9, 2009

Worst Week Ever

BEGIN RANT

With the exception of this one day, this week has been downright awful, and that is not an exaggeration. Why? You might ask. Well, it's really very simple:

People who work for banks=jerks.

Corrupt banking policies designed to screw you over=losing nearly an entire paycheck and me having a mental breakdown in the bathroom complete with hysterical sobbing, breaking of many items, followed by full blown panic attack and a cold shower.

As if the entire economical system isn't messed up enough, the policies at the bank where you put your hard earned money are designed in such a way that YOU CAN'T WIN.

Take our bank for example: I was of the understanding that if you deposit cash, then the cash is obviously immediately available in my account. Because see, I gave them the money, they put it in the account, easy? Yes? NO. Apparently, you have to deposit the cash before 2pm or it does not exist. And even then, if you put CASH in before 2pm it is in your AVAILABLE balance, BUT does not post to the account until midnight. And because our bank is full of jerks and con artists (apparently), if you have a debit come through at midnight AFTER you deposited CASH before 2pm, the debit will go through first thereby insuring that you overdraft your account.

But it's okay because, see you have a savings account with the same bank set up for overdraft protection so you don't incur overdraft fees. Right? WRONG. See if your debits (the ones coming in at midnight after you already put cash into your account the previous morning) add up to equal more money than is in said savings account, NONE of them will come out of savings thereby insuring that the bank can now charge you a fee of $38 for EACH INDIVIDUAL TRANSACTION and you are now, as they say: SCREWED.

Commence with the aforementioned completely hysterical mental meltdown.

Then follow that up with THREE DAYS of trying to get anyone at the bank to talk to you and explain to you how all of this happened in the first place and trying to get at least some of your money back from the jerks and you get: THE WORST WEEK EVER.

Finally, after being fed up with the bank's branch manager brushing us off for three days, I called the bank (again) and asked the man exactly what I had to do in order to speak with someone more important than him. My inquiry was followed by more of his evasive maneuvers, upon which I logged onto the bank's website and typed up an extremely well written and slightly derisive complaint.

Let me just say that normally I HATE confrontations. I will do anything to avoid them, but when it comes down to the welfare of my family being threatened, I have this mother bear instinct that cannot be suppressed and then my tongue goes all sharp. My little sister once told me that my greatest weapon was my mouth because as soon as I decided to use it you might as well just hang it up. Apparently my verbal blows are pretty intense and in the end you probably would have fared better if I had just punched you in the face.

When I do decide to get catty, I like to do so with a big vocabulary and as intelligently as possible and with no swearing. There is just something magical about a well written and intelligent attack. But this time, I broke my non-swearing rule and told the man that as soon as he was ready to pull his head out of his a** and give me the information I needed about my account, I would be more than happy to leave him alone. BUT that until then I would continue to bother him in any way that I possibly could.

He called 5 minutes later and informed us that indeed some of the fees incurred were going to be put back and should be back in the account by next Tuesday.

Usually, I might have tried to be more understanding, but something like this happens literally like once a month. Just when we think we've got the whole deposit/debit thing figured out, they pull something else out on us like losing my husband's DIRECT DEPOSIT for a week.

So yeah, now we know: CASH, even when deposited before 2pm, prior to any debits that may post at midnight, when the moon is in the seventh house and wet moose's are walking backwards... STILL does not EXIST in the account because obviously we are all just using monopoly money anyhow.

GAH Needless to say, we are switching banks as soon as all the account mumbo jumbo catches up and everything has finished posting.

END RANT

3 comments:

Daphne said...

:( Hugs!! Go for a nice walk and take some deep breaths!!

Anonymous said...

rant away. i hate dealing with this kind of stuff.

and the thing is the rules are always different. depending not just on the bank you get but also the teller you get. anytime i have banking to do its done first thing in the morning, because thats when im out. if i deposit cash, sometimes its there immediately, other times its not. sometimes the teller has even asked me if i want it to be available immediately. What? of course! why wouldnt i?!

i know for a fact that after midnight my bank does the credits first and then the debits, so if something were to hit the account in that weird in between time, id be covered. i only know this because i had to ask. personally, i think all banks should do it this way. if they are doing debits first, then its just one more way they are screwing you.

i really wish there was more regulation among banking. but i doubt there ever will be because banks make money if you and i arent aware of all the ins and outs and crazy rules.

anyway, hope you have a nice weekend and a decent week and that it gets straightened out. ive been in this spot. it sucks. hang in there!

Theresa said...

Tammie: SO TRUE. The rules at our bank are always different depending on who the teller is. I mean how many ways can you deposit cash anyway?

I did some research and apparently MANY banks design their systems in order to screw people over. It's ridiculous.

The bank we are looking at changing over to does credits before debits though, so hopefully we can get things sorted out and moved over there ASAP.

Daphne: That is exactly what I did. A nice brisk walk to vent out all this stress.

Thanks for reading and caring guys!