Direction Connection

The title of this post was going to be “The Thing Rebecca is Too Upset to Post About” but I didn’t title it that, for two reasons. The first is that I don’t really like that “about” hanging out there at the end of the title. It’s just not very pleasing. The second is that Rebecca would like me to link to Bank of America a lot, because this post is about something very upsetting that Bank of America did that has significantly affected our mental health, which we hope will have a short-term kind of effect, but, well, you never know…

Here’s the whole story, as short as I can make it. Rebecca and I had been talking about opening up a joint account for several months. We had been doing the whole “I-got-that-thing-the-other-day-for-sixty-bucks-so-you-get-this-thing-for-seventy-bucks-and-then-I’ll-owe-you-ten-bucks-or-maybe-pick-up-something-at-the-store-for-both-of-us-and-then-we’ll-be-even” thing for way too many months. We even figured out that at the grocery store, they’ll split your bill between two debit cards if you ask them. Nice as it was of the people at the grocery store, even that was getting a little old.

So on the day we returned from our New Year’s vacation in Asheville, Rebecca suggested that we go to Bank of America and open a joint account, since we were both off work, and in one place, and it was a weekday during regular business hours. So we did. That was January 3, 2007. Yes, you say, just three and a half weeks ago. What can go wrong with a Bank of America joint account in less than a mere month?

We were so excited to streamline our financial lives! I arranged for a portion of my paycheck to be deposited into our Bank of America joint account every month, I set up some bills for automatic payment, and we used their bill-pay service to send a check to our landlord for February rent. I had a spreadsheet (which is not so very difficult to believe for those who know me), and I’d even trained Rebecca so that she not only actually saved receipts, but even, sometimes, put a little “J” at the top of them so I could keep them separate from my individual account receipts. We were so organized!

Here’s the part where the story becomes disturbing. Yes, I am about to tell a very disturbing story about our Bank of America joint account.

On Sunday (January 28, 2007), I noticed that there was a pending transaction for a $125 debit from our Bank of America joint account with the following description: “NC TLR cash withdrawal from CHK #### Banking Ctr WEST ASHEVILLE #00″. Unlike the deposit (yes, deposit) that I had made to the account just two days before that, there was no option to view the withdrawal slip that accompanied this transaction. I called Bank of America on Sunday and was told that we couldn’t get any more information because it was still a pending transaction. Rebecca called Bank of America on Tuesday morning (after it had posted), and was told that, most of the time, this sort of thing is due to teller error. He said they needed 48 hours to investigate the matter, and told us that we should close the account* and open a new one, and that they’d be “less responsible” for any future suspect transactions if we didn’t. Well, that sounds like very reasonable advice, except when you consider that it was the end of the month, and we have a variety of automatic deposits and withdrawals that are about to hit the account. We decided not to close the account until after we heard the results of their investigation, which we expected to hear on Thursday morning. We were frustrated but willing to wait for it to sort itself out. We trusted that Bank of America would conduct itself reasonably and with good judgment. We were so wrong.

So, tonight, Rebecca is making dinner and I’m paying bills and checking my online accounts and things like that. And I log onto our Bank of America joint account, and see that it appears our Bank of America joint account is overdrawn by nearly a million dollars ($887,375.29, to be exact). Even though I knew that this couldn’t possibly be so, my pulse definitely quickened at seeing such a large number in red print with a negative number in front of it. I showed Rebecca, and she was, um, upset. She immediately got on the phone with Bank of America, but was unable to talk to anyone in the fraud department. She was very emphatic with the customer service representative (and her supervisor) with whom she did speak that she did not in any way authorize Bank of America to put a hold on our Bank of America joint account. Apparently, this is now noted in our account.

One, um, useful thing Rebecca did learn is that the way Bank of America puts a hold on your account is to make it look like someone tried to withdraw $888,888.88. Yes, this is the most sophisticated method that Bank of America could think up to indicate that your account has a hold on it. My credit union (silly credit union!) actually uses words to tell its customers that. Hmmm.

So that’s where we are right now. Our account looks like its balance is close to a million in the red, we have pending automatic credits and debits that are probably going to be denied over the next several days, and we’re not convinced that Bank of America is willing to take responsibility for what may have been a series of Bank of America errors. We haven’t done anything wrong in this situation, yet it seems to me that Bank of America has forgotten that we are their customers, not the ones who created this mess.

* I forgot to mention another positively fabulous thing: Bank of America won’t just open up another joint account for us as a courtesy. No, we’ll actually need to find the time once again when both of us are off work, and in one place, and it’s a weekday during regular business hours when we can open up a new account. At this point, we’re thinking that if we do close our Bank of America joint account, it’s starting to look like we’ll open up a new joint account somewhere other than Bank of America.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Day-to-Day Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.