July 31, 2006 11:04 pm

Banking Fiasco Redux

:note: Fear Factory – “Dog Day Sunrise”

First order of business: JessicaRabbit‘s son Steve turns 16 today! Happy birthday, Steve!

Second order of business: Today is also Harry Potter’s birthday. Hee!

Third order of business: Hating my bank. Allow me to elaborate.

The following is taken from a page I used to have on my site a very long time ago (edited a bit for coherence):

A couple of weeks ago, I went to open a checking account. I decided on VeryFamousBank because there’s a bunch of them all over the place and ATMs and things are near my college. So. First, my mom and I have to wait over a half an hour to be helped. We finally get to talk with the teller lady and she starts the process.

About a half an hour into said process, she’s printing papers and happens to set some of them down on the desk in front of me. I notice that she has my name spelled “Megan” and not “Meggan” how it’s supposed to be. So I alerted her to this mistake (which was totally not forgivable; I’ll explain) and she had to re-do every instance of my name on the entire account. The reason it isn’t forgivable is because I handed her my driver’s license to copy my name from. Granted, it was folded a little, but you could still see my name clearly, and very obviously, my signature. Which has two G’s in it. She claimed the mistake was due to my license being folded, but you could still see the name perfectly.

I asked for a debit (ATM) card to go along with my account and some checks. My debit card was to arrive within 3 to 5 business days. This was really important because I was leaving for Portland to the Type O Negative concert and needed the card before then so I could buy food and gas and stuff. I receive my card in the mail the day before we leave, and the name on the goddamn card says MEGAN. I was going to kill this lady. I had to call the bank and ask them if it was okay to use it because my name is not Megan, it’s Meggan. They said it was okay and I could sign for it anyway if I had to. Then a few days later, I receive my checks which say none other than MEGAN on them. So now I have like, three thousand checks that I can’t use either. Ugh. I was so disgusted.

The lady said that for the mistake, I would receive a $5 deposit according to their “Five-star customer service pledge” or something. I got the account weeks ago and have already received a bank statement and I have yet to see this five dollars. Or my new checks. Banking sucks.

Brief update on the story: I still have the gazillion checks with the incorrect name, and I never did see that five dollar guarantee. But I did receive the correctly spelled card and checks. Eventually.

My card is set to expire this month, which means that VeryFamousBank will mail you your new card to activate. My billing address is my “home” address in Idaho, so this card was presumably mailed there. I called my mom about it today because I figured it would have arrived already and I was anxious to get it set up and stuff so I wouldn’t forget.

And wouldn’t you know it? The name on the replacement card is “MEGAN.”

File Under:

Tagged: No tags

3 Comments

  • callie says:

    LAAAAAAAMMMMMMME!!! I’m so sorry.

  • Melissa says:

    I honestly don’t understand how in the hell mistakes like this just continue on and on and on. Are people really that incompetant that they can’t perform their jobs at least partially correctly? This is one thing that drives me nuts more than anything regarding companies in the US.

  • Paul says:

    Well to be fair Melissa, the individual(s) at the bank that are in charge of this stuff, are doing their job partially correctly. Actually I’d say mostly correctly, with the small snafu, of typos.

    But yeah, seriously, it is plain silliness that a mispelling could go on that long. But atleast it’s something that was predictable, rather than some completely random misspelling like “Meghan, or Meg.” haha… Meg.