Customer Service not! …Or how not to run a bank

It really shouldn’t have been this hard. The back-story: My brother and I had been maintaining two joint accounts to cover expenses related to our mother’s estate. A couple of weeks ago, it was evident that the last bills related to the estate were about to be paid and it was time to close the two accounts.

One of the accounts was a savings account. Since there was more than enough money in the checking account to cover all of the remaining expenses, there was no reason to maintain the savings account. Before closing it, though, I asked, in very explicit terms, how much I needed to keep in the checking account to avoid any fees. The banking person [whatever title he may have] assured me that there was more than enough in the checking account to avoid any fees. Thus informed, I closed the savings account and distributed the money in that account appropriately.

Imagine my surprise, merely two weeks later, to open up the monthly statement and discover a new $30 monthly maintenance fee for the remaining checking account. I quickly returned to the bank in question – only to find a different banking person sitting at the same desk.

She assured me that we did not have enough in that account to avert the monthly fee and could not figure out why the previous occupant of that chair told me otherwise.

With these new facts, there was little incentive to keep that account open even 1 minute longer than necessary. Indeed all of the checks which had been written had cleared so I asked that we close that account as well. But now the plot thickens. For reasons unrelated to this tale, the distribution of the remaining money was to be uneven. My brother was to receive $500 more than me.

I guess this kind of higher mathematics is not covered in banker training school. The person with whom I was speaking spent a substantial amount of time with pieces of paper and pressing keys on her keyboard trying to figure out how to determine the proper amounts for each of the two checks. After some time, she excused herself to go to a teller to get the checks. That took an additional 20 minutes! And when she returned it turned out that my brother’s check was not $500 more than mine, but exactly $1000 more than mine.

When I showed that to the aforementioned bank person, she took out her trusty paper and pencil and wrote the numbers down, subtracted, and lo and behold she too saw that there was a $1,000 differential.

This was clearly too much for her to solve on her own so we both went back to the teller who explained that her computer seemed to be not working properly and that is why the checks were written incorrectly. [you, dear reader, are given permission to smile in a patronizing manner at that excuse.] As it happens, I still remembered my 5th grade math and within a moment calculated the correct amounts. Both of the bankers wrote those numbers down, checked them twice, tried to find out if I was naughty or nice – and, amazingly came to the same arithmetic conclusions that I had.

All that remained was the process of reversing whatever they had to do with the mistaken checks, write new ones, and send me on my way.

One might think, after close to an hour handling this very minor procedure, that an apology for the combination of errors would have been forthcoming – but none was. There was no offer to reverse the $30 monthly fee, nor even an apology for that error, no apology that two people working together could not figure out how to divide an amount of money so that one was exactly $500 more than the other, and certainly no apology for the extended amount of time I spent there.

I should point out that no other customers came into that bank on Manhattan’s affluent Upper East Side during the entire time I was there. Are you surprised?

I don’t know if I should mention the name of the bank, but its signs are red, the first letter is “S” and the last is “n” and there are 3 syllables. Don’t expect to see me there.