October 02, 2013

The chronic malcontent feels resentment at a sorry-ass data entry snoid

While I wait for my Chair to chew up and spit out my dissertation draft, I have the pleasure of doing... nothing much. I wasn't going to blog today; I have some important things on my to-do list (clean tub, take nap, put away laundry). However, something happened today that I need to whine about. I have spent the last hour pretending that it didn't affect me. But I can't seem to focus on getting anything done, so clearly it affects me some. After all, when you decide to clean the tub, you must have laser-like focus, otherwise someone could get hurt. Know what I mean?

So, here's my rant. I checked email this morning, like I always do, and found a terse note from my big megabank, which has hosted my money since it took over Security Pacific back in the early 1990s. I have never had a problem with big megabank, and I still don't. But imagine my shock and horror when I read the email telling me that my account was now at $0.00. Yep. Not even any pennies. Zip. Zilch. Empty. All gone.

Hoping it was a phishing error, I logged into my account. Nope. Zero. And the culprit was in plain sight. September's rent check (which [full disclosure] was a replacement check [minus a $30 stop fee] for a check that had gone AWOL, not my fault!)—Septembers' replacement rent check had been posted in error: instead of $695, some drunken data entry snoid probably somewhere back east had added an extra zero, causing $6,950 to be extracted from my checking account. Well, I don't know how you roll, but I don't normally keep that much in checking, so bam! That misbegotten nameless bank hoovered out all my funds and then proceeded to tap my savings account to make up the difference.

After a few tense moments, I found an 800 number. I wrestled the voice mail system into providing me with a live person by shouting “Fraud! Help! Help! Help!” into the phone. The neighbor probably thought I was being robbed (although he never showed). Finally a polite young gal got on the phone and calmed me down. She could see immediately what had happened.

“I'll put in the order to reverse the transaction,” she said sweetly. “And I'll credit back the $10.00 overdraft fee.” Ha. Like I cared about a lousy $10.00 when $6,255 of my money had been siphoned out of my accounts in the blink of someone's bleary hungover eye.

“How long will that take?” I asked, thinking of all the October automatic payments that will soon be hitting my account. Please tell me a few hours.

“Up to five business days,” she said cheerfully. “And now, if you have ten minutes, would you like to talk to a financial advisor about how to invest that money in your money market savings?”

I almost said, what money? Seriously? You are trying to sell me more services, when I've just been electronically violated? Jeez, it hurts to sit down, and she's telemarketing me! God grant me strength. Well, I had a good excuse to refuse her offer: my breakfast was overcooking. In my freaked out haste to alter my circumstances, I had forgotten that my veggies were sweltering on the stove. Oops. Well, at least I hadn't cracked the eggs yet.

So the remedy for my tattered bank account is “pending,” and I'm realizing that living in an electronic world has its curses as well as its blessings. But we've always been at the mercy of data entry errors. It can happen to anyone at anytime. Banks track their error rates. If they are really good, they keep it to 2%. That's why they have fancy validation procedures, to make sure this doesn't happen. Imagine if I had had a business, with irate employees and bounced payroll checks and vendor payments. We would lose all trust in business. Not that we had much to begin with.

And I can't even register my phone number on the Do not call list, because the darn government is on holiday in Tahiti. So I keep getting robocalls from the credit card consolidation companies. What is up with that? If they did a little homework, they would find out I haven't had a credit card in years. Well, what the funk. Enough ranting. Am I sufficiently calm to begin the task of scouring the tub? I wouldn't want to try it when I'm tense with fear and resentment. I might do something crazy.