Evil Bank Issues

[Juniper]

Banks are evil, I am convinced of it.

I guess there's probably someone here who works for a bank and I'm offending him or her. Well, tough noogies, my daddy worked for this same bank I'm bitching about for 40 years. In a different department. And they didn't treat him much better than they've been treating me.

The most evil thing they've done to me was to screw up my mortgage payment. I made the payment online, which the bank promises me is a perfectly normal OK thing to do, right? Didn't arrive, and the mortgage co. called me asking why I didn't pay. Great.

Of course the mortgage co. is a bank too. So what THEY did was to ask me for a check number for a telephone payment, and charged me $15 for the privilege, then proceeded to (accidentally) charge me two times the normal payment.

Meanwhile, my bank apologized for the trouble, said they'd send it through again and cancel the first. I told them not to, because I'd already paid it, but they did it anyway. The eventual outcome was that my mortgage co. received FOUR TIMES my mortgage payment all at once. This is not a phone bill, folks, you know damn well a mortgage payment is hard enough to afford ONCE a month. Yikes. It was just a lucky fluke I had enough in the account.

And of course, they think nothing of charging me fees for using the overdraft protection which was supposed to be free - it's free the first couple times, but you know how they do it, they drag their feet posting your deposits but waste no time deducting your payments.

So here's the latest atrocity. I am SO mad right now.

I got a check for about $5,000. Doesn't matter where I got it, right? It's a real check, from a real company, drawn on a US bank. I am self-employed and it is entirely conceivable that one of my clients would pay me that amount of money for a project. It's not THAT much money.

When I deposited the check, the teller said "since this check is Sooooo big, someone will be calling you to talk about your accounts." Why? I asked. "Just to make sure everything is set up right." Whatever.

A week went by. I checked my account online. It said the check was still "pending." Hello? I NEED that money. I have bills to pay. In fact I have already paid some, assuming (duh, never ass-ume) that the check would go through in a couple of days. So now the bank says -- get this -- I am OVERDRAWN. Because my check is "pending."

I called the bank. The nice lady on the phone said "that's bank policy, we always put a hold on checks over a certain amount." B-b-but...I've deposited checks like this before, from the same company, and they always went through in a day or so. "No," she assures me, "it's always been that way." She tells me it will be released on Friday. That was Tuesday, btw.

But I need it NOW. I have bills to pay, right? She acts like I am doing something shady, trying to use my money like that.

Because the check was SO big. I'll say it again, $5,000 is not THAT big. Add another zero and I'd buy that explanation, but come on!

I might add at this point that we just had a big wind storm here thanks to Ike, and for the last few days while the electric was out, if you needed to buy anything you needed cash to do it, not plastic. I was out of gas Monday and found an ATM, but could only get out $40 because of "insufficient funds." This is how I found out about the bank's little game.

So I called again today. I spoke to someone who had a brain. He was able to get the check "released" and agreed with me that it was stupid, because after all, I have a credit card connected with my checking account anyway with a higher limit than that stupid OH so big check. I asked why they put a hold on the check. He said "it was a judgment call on the part of the teller."

Apparently this teller did not believe it was a real check.

Because $5K is SOOOOO big.

Once before when depositing a similar check, I was asked (at this same branch) what the check was for. Um....it's my paycheck? (and no, believe me, it's not weekly! I get paid very sporadically.) "Just wanted to make sure you weren't getting scammed," she said.

And apparently this "phone call" I was going to get from the bank was to "advise" me on how to invest my sudden windfall. Hello? Bills? Why is it the bank's business how I'm going to spend my money?

OK, I'm done ranting. Am I crazy, or is this just incredibly unreasonable and intrusive?

Definitely time to change banks!