Some days are not worth getting out of bed.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

First the fridge broke down last night. I had to move most things to the freezer, which was as cool as the fridge should be. Some things had to be thrown away. Today I locate a tech guy who could come and fix it the same day, he works specifically with this brand, great, but he has to come after he leaves his day job at about 6:30 pm.

Because of some convoluted arrangement in our finances I have to make a transfer request to access money in our account. So I send a fax to People’s Shitty Bank to transfer some money in the morning. People’s Shitty Bank only accepts transfer requests in the morning, but no problem, I got that covered, money gets transfered.

After lunch I pack up the kid to go to the ATM, we go to Crappy Bank of Canada, the closest of three banks in our inmediate neighborhood. Big error. I put my ATM card in, punch the numbers, transaction goes through but no money comes out. Them somebody comes and tells me the machine is broken (there were some other people behind me). Great, they tell me after the transaction has gone through. I check my balance, there’s the equivalent of US$1.20 left in my account. She tells me I have to go to People’s Shitty Bank, personally, and file a a claim, “you’ll get your money back in an hour or so”. After I gave them a piece of my mind for being incompetent slobs who couldn’t come up with the idea of taping a handwritten note to their piece of crap machine I had to go to People’s Shitty Bank, which luckily had an office not far from there.

But let’s go back to before I left home. The car didn’t want to start. I think the battery has seen the last of it. I finally get the car to start and go to Crappy Bank of Canada to get money from the ATM.

Fast forward to the trip to People’s Shitty Bank to file a claim. Car doesn’t want to start, again. Eventually it does. Their Customer Mocking representative tells me I didn’t actually have to go in person, it could be done by phone. Great, I’ll keep that in mind for next time. Conveniently though, they have a direct line there and I speak to yet another Customer Mocking representative who tells me it’ll take 10 days to get an answer to their investigation. Ooohoo, great, I need that money, like, NOW! I have a non-working, half-empty fridge at home, and a tech guy who’s on his way. I also give them a piece of my mind, not a big piece mind you, there’s not much mind left after all this.

I go home, pick up credit card and go for some money at another ATM, this is not a drive-through, so I leave the car running outside with the windows open and tell their watchman not to stop the thief if somebody tries to steal it.

Tomorrow I have to do something about the stupid car battery. And all this has to happen when the husband is somewhere in Africa. Og I hate banks! And fridges. And car batteries, dead or alive.

Thanks for lending me your ear. I needed to whine badly.

2

I hope your day gets better. It doesn’t sound good about the fridge.

3

So what’s happened since your post? Don’t leave us hanging!

4

FYI, when I think of you getting ugly with the customer “service” people, I hear it in Spanish. Loud, angry Spanish – because Spanish is such a good language to be angry and loud in.

I second the request for an update, BTW.

5

Ahhh, that was a long day. In the end I did get my fridge fixed, the car battery changed but no word from People’s Shitty Bank about my money. We shall see.

6

In my heart, I hope that “People’s Shitty Bank” = Banco Popular. I hate those people. When we got married, my wife had a Banco Popular credit card. She used it during our honeymoon and for about a week afterwards. Then we paid it off and closed it.

Except, to our surprise, we didn’t. No, three years later, they are calling my in-laws house and demanding that the balance be paid. According to them, no one ever told them to close the account, and there was an annual fee due several months after we closed it… and a late fee that month and every month thereafter that we failed to pay them anything. This supposedly zero’d out and closed card was showing a balance of over $1000 USD. (The only bright side to this story was that this all happened when the peso was at about 45-1, or else that $1000 would have been more like $1500.)

After several days of fruitless negotiation, we just bit the bullet and paid. This went against every instinct I had as a consume, but my wife was convincing in her explanations of how things simply work differently in the DR.

I have no love for Banco Popular.

7

Obviously, you weren’t soup yet. :smiley:

8

And your heart would be right. But if it is any consolation (yeah, right), exactly the same thing happened to me with Citi. I have them in my black list forevermore.