My bank is getting me down on the whole money thing.
The bank keeps sending mortgage funds, over and over. When the excess funds were returned to the bank along with a request to stop sending mortgage funds, not one, but two bankers called back asking for instructions on into which account they should drop the further funds (further – wtf!). To quote the real estate clerk, “In twenty-five years, I have never seen a mortgage screwed up this badly.” At the rate the bank is shovelling money at me, I’ll be a millionaire by the end of the week, my client will wonder by he is being cleaned out by the bank for his interest payments, and the clerk will probably fly down to the bank’s mortgage office and go postal.
Meanwhile, for four months the bank has been diping into my trust funds that I hold for clients (a huge no-no that would end my career quite quickly if left unattended), and my banker has been unable to get its system to stop doing this, leading to a manual correction every month. I like speaking with my banker, but it would be nice to have something other than a “Groundhog Day” type of conversation.
The bank electronically lost my credit card account for a couple of months when moving some of my accounts from one region to another – the first day of it going AWOL being the day my E&O payment was to be made from it. The automatic payments kept on going through, and the card continue to work both on in-person and on-line transactions, but the bank was unable to produce statements or find it in its system. Then it magically re-appeared, as if it had never gone walk-about. No one at the bank is able to explain it.
My phone payments to my business phone lines have been dumped into my home phone lines account,with the bank blaming the phone company, and the phone company blaming the bank. I only discovered this this afternoon, when the phone company called up to threaten disconnection of my business lines, despite my bank statements indicating regular full payments. The good part is that I won’t be paying any home phone bills until some time in 2008.
The bank was unable to arrange for the printer to print my correct address on the cheque orders for a couple of accounts I opened up a few months ago, despite three attempts.
Trying to keep on top of all this nonsense is putting a dint in my billables. If I wanted to be a bean counter, I would have become a bean counter, but I do not like bean counting, so I did not become a bean counter. Yet here I sit, counting beans, trying to get the bank errors fixed.
The sad thing is that this is the bank in town that screws up the least (trust me on this one – I have seen some loopy errors in my clients’ matters by other banks that make my problems look trivial), my banker is the best problem solver that I have come across in the various banks about town, and being in her book leads to a lot of business for me from her other customers, so I willl not be jumping ship anytime soon, despite the problems of the last few months
At the moment, however, I’m quite disgusted with the entire money thing, and the necessity of using a bank. If it were summer, I could simply hop in my canoe, take of my clothes, and paddle out to the islands, but it’s about twenty below at the moment, so even that is out. I think I’ll go find a stick in the woods, and poke my banker with it at our next meeting.
Poke, poke, poke – take that Madam Banker. I like ya, but nonetheless, poke, poke, poke.