BANK SHOT
Of Finance, Customer Service, and Vampire Squid
Another adventure in home ownership!

How about this for the first line of a humor article — I just got off the phone with Chase Bank!
Cue the crickets.
Customer service and the financial industry are both very high on my $#!+ list. One is a bewildering maze that only makes sense when you realize it has nothing to do with customers or service. The other is, to paraphrase an article in Rolling Stone, “a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
The degree of difficulty for a successful dive into this mess is slightly higher than a Reverse 1½ Somersault With 4½ Twists into an open sewer and coming out smelling like a rose.
The only way to win is not to play — except they’d called to say our mortgage payment had been declined.
Yikes!
If we were broke, something had gone horribly awry. Most of the Internet is as real as a unicorn ranch, but identity theft is a rabid polar bear. Our retirement goals never included a French chateau with gourmet meals of Bordeaux and cheese that smells like feet. But I’d prefer not to spend my golden years in a cardboard box, washing down cat food with Mad Dog 20/20.
So what fiend had declined the payment to our Chase mortgage?
Chase.
Wait, what?
I thought my next question was obvious — “Why is your bank refusing to pay the mortgage we hold with your bank?” I assumed the caller could answer it, seeing as she worked there.
She could not.
It wasn’t a gotcha situation. She called me. It’s not my fault she didn’t know why. It’s the kind of quality work we expect from financial institutions. Welcome to The Customer Service Experience, where Murphy’s Law goes to feel better about itself.
After a few minutes of rocking out to hold music, she transferred me to another department.
Then we solved the problem. Well, I did.
Our mortgage is managed by an indirect banking bank shot. We never wanted an account at Chase, but they insisted we open one. We’re supposed to deposit money into that, and they pay the mortgage from it.
So I asked the agent how it could be empty when we’d set up automatic payments from Bank of America.
Not only didn’t he know, he doubted such payments even existed.
I had to find the answer myself. I pulled up our B of A statements to verify there were monthly withdrawals paid to Chase. But the mortgage payments had gone up, so it was falling short. I tried to increase the amount, but autopay at B of A operates by quantum rules. It existed — I could see the withdrawals — but otherwise, there was no evidence one had ever been set up.
Yay, team.
But that was a future problem. At the moment, I just needed out of whatever circle of hell this was. I told the agent I wanted to pay off the current charge.
He couldn’t do it.
Are you beginning to sense a theme here? It started way back at the beginning. The agent delivered a moving sermon when we opened the account, pleading with us to get their credit card. I tried, and — everybody say it with me — they rejected the application.
Let’s just say I don’t trust these guys.
So, back to the hold music and waiting for the mortgage department. I stayed polite despite the angry monkeys in my brain swamp shrieking for vengeance. Three cheers for adulting.
Like the previous clown car occupants, the new agent didn’t know why we were talking. So clueless me tried again to explain as best I could.
I’m dumb but not stupid, so I set my sights low — all I wanted was to pay the bill.
He was baffled. Was I asking to pay down the principal?
I think of myself as a cynical resident of Planet FUBAR, but there must be some genetic optimism I haven’t been able to shake. I naively thought he would be thrilled to help. His employer is in the money business, and I was offering to take some away from a competitor and give it to them.
Murphy was an optimist.
Mercifully, we managed to set up a one-time payment to cover the current balance plus the following month.
To summarize, it wasn’t even noon, and I’d been an unwilling participant in three phone calls and forced to explain things I didn’t know to people who were supposed to.
I know for many of you it sounds like a day ending in “y.” But if I wanted that kind of life, I would work somewhere else. I’m self-employed, so my boss is an asshole but we occasionally understand each other.
At least the situation was managed. For now. Maybe.
To solve this, we need to refocus Bernie Sanders. Forget the minimum wage, Senator. We need a law establishing a minimum level of service something must have to call it that. Then we solve hunger and the banking mess in one fell swoop with Vampire Squid Calamari for All.
Save me the blood funnel. It’s the best part!
“John Werth” is the nom de plume of a large group of monkeys typing randomly. Please read and subscribe, our credit with the fruit stand is running out and we need the bananas.
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