Thursday, June 7, 2012

Inconvenient? Bank On It.

I'm reading Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States by Dave Barry. I like this section he has about banks:

"A major problem during the Depression was that people kept trying to get their money out of banks. To put a stop to this kind of thing, the government instituted modern banking regulations, under which:

* The banks are never open when it might be convenient.

* The customer is never sure what his bank's name is, since they keep changing it, usually from something like 'The First Formal Federal National State Bank of Savings Loans and Of Course Trust' to something like 'InterContiBankAmeriTransWestSouthNorthCorp.'

* There are always stupid people in line ahead of you trying to cash checks from the Bank of Yemen and using underwear labels for identification."

My bank switched from Wachovia to Wells Fargo 14 months ago. My only concern was whether I could continue using my Wachovia debit card. (I could.) Yesterday Wells Fargo just (finally) mailed me a new debit card, which you can set up by calling a phone number or going to one of their ATMs. So today I went to the bank for the sole purpose of setting up my new debit card at the ATM (because I HATE talking on phones). Of course once I got there I discovered the ATM was "temporarily out of order." Seriously? Are you freaking kidding me? Inconvenient.

And Dave Barry is so right about the bank not being open. The only times my bank is open and I'm not working during are for 45 minutes on Friday afternoon and three hours on Saturday morning (which I'm generally sleeping during). Inconvenient. And lately whenever I do get in there, they always harass me about changing my savings account. Just cash the check and leave me alone, OK? Thank God I have direct deposit.

1 comment:

jesstexter said...

This is the part where you switch back to phx federal (if they're still called that. lol) My bank changed from Sky to Huntington about three or four years ago, and a lot of things got more annoying, but then they fixed some of them and made some new perks. Like I have a feature where they move money from my savings to my checking rather than giving me an overdraft fee, or they have a 24hour grace period for you to get more money in your account before charging you with an overdraft fee. (that was a huge annoyance for a while, cuz our automatic withdrawals would happen like the DAY before the automatic deposit. obnoxious. so we haven't had a problem with that lately. :) But yeah, bank hours are usually not helpful. The same as post office hours, I'm finding. Post office is open 8:30am to 5pm mon-fri, which is the hours I babysit and can't go. So there's the 8:30 til noon slot on sat (as long as I'm not scheduled to work then too. ugh.)