This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves
to be my disciples. John 15:8

A small tirade

>> Wednesday, August 8, 2007

I am currently going through a struggle with my bank. In my very earliest adult years, I had struggles with my bank that were really just struggles with my own spending habits. This struggle, however, is entirely the fault of my bank, they admit that, and yet we can't seem to get it fixed. This may be educational for some of you, I have certainly learned a few things through this process. The bottom line of things is that they let a check clear my account for $100 more than I wrote it for. It was my tithe check, and I wish I could say that I lived within a budget that would just allow my church to keep the extra money, but I don't. $100 is a lot of money in our world. So I called my bank, figuring that this was a simple human error, that they hit the wrong key, and they would just fix it. I could not have been more wrong.

I found the error on June 30. That's right...over a month ago. I immediately called the bank, and the gal said this would only take a moment, she would just look at the "image" of the check, verify the correct amount on the check, and adjust things. I sat on hold for a minute, then she came back, telling me "Oops! Our image of the check shows the check to be blank!" From there things have spiraled out of control. Here's the educational part. My bank never saw my check. Apparently my church's bank, Wells Fargo, made the image of the check that appeared to be blank and sent it to my bank. At that time my bank sent them the amount of money they asked for. WITHOUT IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM BEING ABLE TO VERIFY THE ACTUAL AMOUNT THE CHECK WAS WRITTEN FOR!! This is the way banks do things now, people!!! Sure, most of the time checks don't show up as blank on the imaging system, but the fact that mine did means that other people's do sometimes and if your bank is anything like mine, they see no need to know how much the check was actually written for before handing over some of your money. Here comes some more education. Even though it bothered me that my bank "cashed" a "blank" check, I still had the delusion that this would be easy to fix. They would simply get my original check and be able to see what I actually intended the amount to be and everything could get resolved, right? Wrong. Because of their perfect, infallible imaging system, banks now DESTROY YOUR CHECKS AFTER THEY HAVE "IMAGED" THEM. This is, of course, unless you request to have your canceled checks returned to you, which I will, from now on, be doing.

I have left a lot of things out of this story, like the fact that since June 30, I have made about 8 phone calls to my bank and have had to re-tell the story each and every time because no one has bothered to put any information in the computer or follow through with any of the promises they made me over the phone. Or the fact that the department that handles cases like this is only open 9-5 M-F, so I have to call and sit on hold for upwards of 45 minutes while I am trying to take care of a 2 year old and an 11 month old. I am finally talking to a supervisor who is calling me everyday to update me whether he has any news or not. He wants to make sure I know he's on top of it. Unfortunately, I don't hold out much hope. He is still in communication with Wells Fargo, hoping that they maybe haven't destroyed my check yet, but it sounds doubtful. He seems to think that there may be some other sort of way to help me with this if my check is gone, but again, I'm not holding my breath.

At this point, I'm not really waiting on anything except for all the dust to settle so I can change banks. This is not the first fiasco I have been through with them, and I'm done. I would have to be a fool to stay. Oh, and I was planning on not revealing their name, but I've changed my mind. I believe in rewarding good customer service, but I also believe in warning my fellow human beings about terrible customer service. So in case you were thinking I was dealing with some tiny, inept bank who doesn't have their act together, you would be right, except for the tiny part. My bank? U.S. Bank.

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