Democracy for Vancouver

This is about how technology, combined with monopolization, outsourcing, possibly anti-terrorism security legislation and an overemphasis on corporate control can often cause more problems than it solves. It is also about how I spent much of my Saturday morning. Sit back, grap a cup of java. It is a long story. It is also a story that is similar to one many of you have probably also experienced in one way or another.

I am not going to use the real names of any of the financial institutions involved because I don’t want to defend myself from a frivolous libel lawsuit. If you want to know and I know who you are, you can send me an email and I’ll let you know the offending financial institution involved. If any of the made up names do exist, be assured it is accidental and not really the actual institution involved.

Once upon a time I had a credit card through the Bank of Venus. The only reason I applied for this credit card was they offered free Continuing Professional Education (CPE) through an online company I was already using and paying for with my hard earned monies. And one way or another I had to complete this CPE in order to satisfy the licensing requirements of my profession.

Sometime around a year ago, as is frequent these days in the endless drive to make the world into one gigantic corporation, Bank of Mars decided to purchase the Bank of Venus credit card account I held, along with certainly millions of other people.

Now Bank of Mars has never been in my top ten list of banks. Going way back to when they seemingly purchased every bank that I could switch my account to in Florida over the course of 10 years or so, my experiences with this banking institution have always ranged from bad to awful to disturbing. For instance, once they refused to provide me with deposit slips without charging me for them. The banking business is in the business of buying and selling money. If I am going to sell them some of my money, why on earth should I have to pay to sell my money to them? Another time they screwed up and made a deposit to someone else’s account and yet kept insisting that the error was my fault and refusing to credit the interest that was lost on the account.

Another time they called down the branch manager and basically tried to hold me hostage because I was making a large withdrawal so that I could invest my money in a discount brokerage house, rather than use their overpriced brokerage arm. I knew, from having certain clients with accounts at this bank’s investment house, that my investments would very likely suffer the same fate as my clients’, namely be churned on a regular basis to increase the transaction fees.

Even more disturbing to me was an experience that happened long after I had permanently given up on the Bank of Mars. My mother opened up a checking account at the Bank of Mercury when she moved closer to me in Florida from another state. A year or two after she opened the Bank of Mercury account, the bank was naturally gobbled up by the Bank of Mars. I advised her to close her account and open one at a different bank but she said she had not had any problems with them, it was close to her and she didn’t want to go through the hassle of moving the account. The latter two reasons are why banks with horrendous customer service are able to continue in business.

Anyway, my mother, about ten years before she died, executed a durable power of attorney in my name. What this document does is allow me to basically take control of her financial life such as bank accounts in the event she becomes incapacitated and unable to take care of her financial affairs herself.

Ten years later my mother was hospitalized, put on life support and pain medications and was unable to do much of anything for the two weeks before she died. So I took the durable power of attorney to her Bank of Mars and had them add me to her accounts so that I could continue to pay the bills associated with her owning her home.

A couple days after I did so, a representative from the bank called my mother and left a message on her answering machine that was meant to inform her of my action. This would not have bothered me in the slightest if the representative had said they were just calling to inform her that her son had invoked the power of attorney and was now in control of her banks accounts and if she had any questions to call the bank. But instead the message was that there was an emergency with regard to her bank accounts, that her son was using the power of attorney to withdraw money from her accounts and she needed to come down to the bank immediately and straighten things out. There was very much the implication by the tone and words of the representative that I was doing something underhanded even though all I was doing was exactly what I was empowered and expected to do under the durable power of attorney.

At the hearing of this message I was too distraught over my mother’s medical condition and attending to her in the hospital to do anything but wish I had pushed harder many years earlier to get my mother to close her accounts at the Bank of Mars.

After my mother died in 2002, a trust was automatically created with me as trustee out of the accounts at the Bank of Mars in order to avoid probate costs. It seemed at the time just easier to leave the accounts there in order to wrap up her affairs rather than go through the trouble of closing the accounts and reopening them somewhere else.

So today I went to pay my credit card with the Bank of Mars (which I only have with them for the free CPE and because they bought out my other credit card company). I have my electric bill go automatically to this credit card each month because in order to get my free CPE, I have to use the card at least once a year. And so I don’t forget to do that, I just have the electric bill be charged to the card and then do an online bill pay for the balance each month which is debited to my bank account at Bank of Saturn.

When I went to do the bill pay this month, I had to go through the usual list of questions about my mother’s uncle’s sister best friend’s name because I periodically delete all the cookies on my computer as part of my routine computer maintenance and the online banking system then automatically assumes I am an identity thief trying to access the account, since it doesn’t recognize the computer that I always use to access the account.

Today I was confronted with a new screen. It said that they detected a new bank account, CD, ATM card or some other account that was associated with this credit card account and that I had to input the account number to obtain access to my credit card account. Since I know that I would NEVER on my own (meaning without the Bank of Mars buying one of my other banks) open up a new account with the Bank of Mars given my prior history with them, I was dumbfounded as to the cause of this problem.

So I called their “we will make your day an extraordinary experience” customer service and proceeded to wade through the inevitable voice mail from hell system that banks actually try to make you think is good customer service when in fact it is no better than trying to call City Hall or Alpha Centauri.

After finally getting through the voice mail maze and pushing the 45 digits or more of information needed to actually hook up with a human, I get someone who I am sure works for a wage at least 50% or less of what is legal in this great country of ours.

I explain the situation and tell the very nice representative that all I want to do is pay my credit card bill online like I do every month. She says that the problem is not something she can help me with but that she can transfer me to the correct department (or should I say country?). She also says that she can process my payment for me if I provide my bank account number and routing information for the payment for a processing fee of $15. I explain to her that normally I do this online and there is no fee. She says that is correct but through her there is a fee of $15. I said that without online access to my account, I cannot pay my bill online and it is due on Monday, a holiday. I ask her if she can process the payment and still make the deadline as I recalled I could also if I processed the payment online. She said yes. So I said well let me try to get this other access problem fixed so I can make the payment without the fee. She said that there is a 2 or 3 day business day delay if I process the payment online. I didn’t remember that being the case previously but rather than get a $30 late charge, I breakdown and ask her to make the payment with the $15 processing fee and then to connect me to the number that can help me with my account access problem.

After making my payment I ask to be transferred to the person in another country that can help me with regaining my access to my online credit card account. She makes the transfer whereupon I explain all of what has transpired to this new, friendly gentleman. He says that I must have opened up a new account since the last time I accessed it and that in order to regain access I had to have that account number. I said I did not do anything of the kind. He says, “Do you have any other accounts with the Bank of Mars”. I said I do not. Finally he pulls up my account record and sees that I am an authorized signer on the trust account that has still not been closed out with the Bank of Mars in Florida (why the trust is still open is another long story that I will save for another day).

I explain to him that other than being the trustee of that account, it is not my account, it should not be associated with my credit card and that their system is messed up. The trust has its own taxpayer ID and in fact the little bit of monies in the trust do not belong to me, they belong to the beneficiaries of the trust, one person of which, is me.

He says that there is no way that I can obtain access to my credit card account without inputting the account number of my deceased mother’s trust account. He says that all accounts that have me as an authorized signer with my social security number must be associated together in order to obtain access. I explain that I am also an authorized signer for a non-profit account at another bank, the Bank of Jupiter, where I do also have a personal checking account (and a credit card account). So that means that this non-profit account will show up on my personal online banking account even though it has absolutely nothing to do with my personal funds and it would be a criminal act for me to actually remove funds from that account and put them in my personal bank account without board of director approval. This argument goes nowhere with the “Indian with a perfect midwestern accent”.

So I dig through my files and find the trust account and input the number. And low and behold my account says I have a personal checking account with the Bank of Mars (which is actually my deceased mother’s trust account) and a credit card. I thank the representative and hang up.

Then, out of curiosity, I click on the bill pay service to see if I actually could have paid the bill online and on time and saved the $15. It tells me that online bill payment has never been set up for my personal checking account (of course it has not since it is not my personal checking account) and to call another 800 number for assistance. So I call this number and receive a message that “our service is not available at this time, please try back later” (in other words it is 3 o’clock in the morning in the country I am calling, Zawiristan).

Now more determined than ever to straighten out this quagmire, I call back the number for the person that had helped me regain access to the account (luckily I had written down the number to this Bangladesh location). Of course a new person answers from some country that the customer service representative is not allowed to disclose and I explain everything from the beginning again and tell him that I just want to be able to pay my credit card online again like I have always done in the past. He explains that the service I was using is no longer available now and that I will have to pay the bill by check or use my originating bank to make the payment in the future. While he is telling me this, I happen to go back and notice there are two different links for the bill pay service, one apparently tied to the checking account and one that is for making an automatic debit to a checking account at another institution. I try clicking the latter link, unlike before, and amazingly I am once again able to make a payment as I have always done in the past.

I then actually make another identical payment on the account because it says that I can still make the payment and have it credited on Nov. 12, contrary to what the customer service person had told me when I paid $15 to have her make the payment by telephone instead.

So I explain to the current customer service person that I just made a payment, blah blah blah and that I would like to have the payment reversed that was done by telephone previously since there was no reason to incur the $15 charge. He says that he only assists people with bill pay service issues and that I had to call back customer service.

Customer service is then called back and I explain all of the above to this new person in Taiwan and he gracefully reverses the $15 charge.

In conclusion, hope you enjoyed this “extraordinary experience”. I didn’t.