06-XI-2009.
On first, bitching about my former bank on the blogue.
And you don't even remember how we parted?
This friday I got this friendly letter from Wachovia (they still seem to stick to the name, although far go they did meanwhile):
Wow. And I was trusting my money to you for some seven years. And you are now closing my line-of-credit account? In case you didn't know, guys, I closed my account three years ago. If you left my line of credit attached to a nonexistent account for three years... you seriously need to get your ducks in line.
Now this is a nice moment to reminisce over those seven years... let's see. Once I got my paycheck and deposited it on the way home, and in the evening I went and bought a few things, total of about 80$, which I was punished for. Why? I overdrafted. Huh? Didn't I just deposit a bunch of hundreds in your computerized office? Didn't you get the money from me? Looking frequently online at the behavior of my account over the following weeks, I noticed that the delay between my shopping and the vanishing of my money from the account was shorter than the three mile drive home. Even if I bought something at the nearest grocery, by the time I went home, the whole transaction between the grocery, card info collector, Visa, your aggregate transactions account and my account was done, and the money was gone from my account. Why is it then that whenever I deposit a check after 14:00 (Am: 2pm) the money appears on my account the next day? There's only ONE hop, between you and you. The check is in your hands, it's YOUR check after all (you sort of owned my employer, and pwned them in the end), so checking its validity wouldn't take more than the usual two seconds - it's your computers, your internal friggin network.
And I did ask you about this, and your representative said something about building and keeping the trust with the recipients of payments (aka the groceries etc etc). Well, how about me trusting you? After all, I'm not sure whether the grocery trusted their money to you, but I surely did. And yet their transaction happens in a microjiffy, mine has to wait until tomorrow. Does my money stink? My account isn't big enough? Well, now it may be, but it's not in your hands because of this kind of contempt you expressed.
Or the other time when I brought some euros from home... I should have converted them all to dollars while I was there [did try, but it would be a two-way conversion, 3% each time], but I just thought that you can do that when I arrive. It took two weeks! You had to send the paperwork and the cash to your center in Pennsylvania (!), and then I had to wait for the paperwork to come back, when you finally booked it to my account. For some reason, the guys in Pennsylvania are utterly incapable of just writing a sum to my account; I envision them as some idiot savants, who only know foreign exchange and not to pee in the kitchen. Should I mention that the exchange rate was far worse than what I feared? Should I mention that anywhere in Europe you can exchange currency in a few minutes? Takes no longer than your usual face-to-face time with a clerk in a post office. And the exchange offices (remember this, it's a new notion, strange as it may seem, but it exists almost everywhere else: repeat, exchange office, exchange office, exchange office...) are quite numerous, even in smaller towns - not in some bank's headquarters, but as little shops, or as yet another window in a tourist agency or... (rim shot, sigh, dramatic smoke pause, drum roll...) ...in a bank.
And the "electronic" payments that I used to pay 5$ a month (in addition to the 5$ I paid only to have an account, so you could play with my money - I guess you also pay as much to anyone who takes a loan from you so they can play with your money), which you eventually screwed up, and my payment for water came late; my account showed timely payment, four days ahead of due date, they claimed the payment came two days late, I refused to pay the fine and paid only the current bill, they charged me another fine... and so it went for ten months, and the charges ran really high. Ridiculously so - on a 12$ water bill, the fine was 7$... and all the time I thought that the billing company screwed up something, and just didn't book the check on time... because it's impossible for an electronic payment to take six days. Electrons, as we all know, travel at the speed of light, don't they?
Yes and no. Normal electrons do; payment electrons don't. They don't exist. Electronic payment is electronic only in that the paper checks you mail on your customers' behalf are printed on a computer, which isn't mechanical or pneumatic or hydraulic, it is electronic. But the checks go snail mail, and you took my money (the 12$ mesečno and played with it just long enough for it to arrive late. Once I pointed the finger in your general direction, you didn't explicitly confess, just asked how much is the accumulated fine and silently credited my account with the amount.
There are other cases... minor, but just as irritating.
As a computing veteran, I detest the way you kept redesigning your website to look nicer and nicer every time, but give less and less information with every iteration. And every new feature worked with IE only, and was only later fixed to work with Netscape (and then Mozilla). Everything would work... except the submit button. Nice touch.
Which altogether meant that our ways would part, and so they did. I closed the account, handed over my remaining checks (btw, what are "access checks" and how are they different from, well, other kinds?), got my paperwork out (I don't owe you, you don't owe me)... and now, three years later, you not only aren't sorry, you actually don't remember? You never loved me, you only asked me to pay you so you could play with my money. Know what? You had some nice staff in places where I visited, pleasant and helpful, but you don't really deserve them. I wish them all to work in a better place.
Though, there was one thing where Wachovia was faster... cashing checks on the spot. I was with UniJewel when I switched to the CU, and for a while I was getting checks from them, and would take them to the nearest CU service center to deposit them. The CUs don't own these centers, they are all small but there are many of them, and these centers serve all of them. The center's fee is invisible, it's the five days they keep the check's amount on their own account. Then, around mid-2005, they made it ten days, and mind you, there are days and banking days, the latter happening maybe 250 times a year, just in the proportion of banking holidays against regular ones. So by the time they sent the next check, my last check would appear on my account. But then I realized these checks were from Wachovia, and there was one just across the street... nice. So I'd go there first, cash the check - immediate, no fee - and deposit the cash in the CU center - same, immediate, no fee.
Installed MySql and experimented with re-doing the Firriver stuff in it, for a while, just long enough to see that it would be feasible, if I had about two months to do it. Most of the time, however, was spent on the SHET stuff, rebuilding it from scratch. The old way with a separate form and outside of the main app was just unsustainable. Rebuilding it the way I already did the Canadian CAAR. Not inheriting, though, just replicating the logic where I can.
Later in the evening, a long chat with George, who wants to jump ship. He's just a temporary consultant, anyway, and has already overstayed expectations. Said, "So I'm not sticking-around because experience tells me how this turns-out: not-good. I've seen this movie several times before". IOW, his prognose is that the company would sink because of a prima donna chief of project, who does everything on the existing crap of an infrastructure because he doesn't have the time to do it right. There's always time to do it twice, though.
[Now when I remember that moment, I think he forced me to reconsider, and at least for myself step out of that mindset. Ther I started thinking what, and how, to do to prevent fixing any piece of shit three more times... May it take as much time as it may, in the end it will be faster. And over time, I succeeded in that.]
Mentions: blogue, CAAR, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), George Whiteley, SHET, UniJewel, in serbian
27-X-2011 - 8-IV-2026