In which the banking industry has no manners because it feels it doesn’t need to.

I’m listed at Chex Systems.

The reason for this starts with a d and ends with ivorce; long story short, all the bills were in my name and we lived just at the very edge of our means and then he quit working and a bunch of shit went ballistic. An unscrupulous creditor put a lien on my checking account and fucked up my financial life. But instead of going bankrupt, I found a debt reduction program and I’ve been paying off my debt for the past three years. Even though it was our debt. So I’m not only not bad, I’m good, mmm’kay? Any bank should be pleased to have me as a customer, because if I were to find myself owing them money I would pay it back.

Okay, what was I saying? Oh, yeah: being listed at Chex Systems means that I cannot open any type of bank account, anywhere, ever. I’ve lived with a pre-paid debit card for four years now. As it takes direct deposit and offers billpay, it works just fine for all of my needs.

Unless someone writes me a check.

I have no way of cashing a check. Most banks won’t even cash an on-us check for free these days (Bank of America charges nearly ten bucks to cash a check drawn on one of their accounts, the fuckers), and so when I was doing the QA work and getting checks, I had to ask G’ma to cash them.

Which she did. Twice. And then she took me down to her bank and got them to open a savings account for me even though they didn’t really want to, so that I could cash my own damn checks. I stuck seven hundred bucks in it and haven’t looked at it since.

~+~+~
My final QA check finally came over the weekend, so yesterday I aired up my tires and rode my bike down to Baker Boyer bank’s main branch. Since I was on a bike in the snow, I was dressed kinda crazy, with layers and hats and things, but I’m still university educated and not a criminal or desperately homeless or anything, by the bye.

I went into the lobby, filled out a deposit slip, and stood in line. I signed the slip (I wanted cash back) and the back of the check in front of the teller.

She chatted me up about the weather as she pecked away at her computer, and then she smiled at me and said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t process this.” She pushed the check back toward me. “You don’t have an account here.”

“What!” I squawked. And “I most certainly do too!” I said, sick unto death of being treated like a fucking criminal by banks. I pulled out the account’s ATM card and slapped it onto the marble counter. “You want my driver’s license?”

“Oh! Um, no,” she said, going back to the computer.

“Maybe I wrote the account number down wrong,” I said, in an attempt to hide my anger. She’s just a cog, she’s not the machine. “I have it here…”

“I found it!” she said. “I transposed the first two numbers of your account; I typed it in wrong.” (The first two numbers of the account are 1 and 1, so she most certainly did no such thing. Maybe she doesn’t know what ‘transpose’ means.)

She completed my deposit, gave me my cash back, and wished me a nice day. I put the money into my wallet and walked back out into the snow, wondering when I started looking like someone who commits bank fraud.

~+~+~
I had handed the teller properly-completed items and signed everything in front of her. It doesn’t get more legit than that; she typed in my account number incorrectly – once – and saw that either there was no account or the account had a different name and immediately assumed I was attempting to put a few hundred bucks into someone else’s account just to get some cash back.

This pisses me off.

Why assume that first? Why not RE-TYPE THE FUCKING ACCOUNT NUMBER, OR DO A NAME SEARCH, BEFORE ACCUSING ME – A CUSTOMER OF YOURS, WITH MONEY IN YOUR BANK – OF ATTEMPTING A CRIME?

I’ll tell you why: because she’s trained to act like that.

~+~+~
The whole thing really pissed me off. If I didn’t need that account, I would have closed it on the spot.

I’m in Walla Walla, for fuck’s sake, not Seattle or Portland or Chicago. And I was wearing a hat because it was snowing, not because I live under a fucking bridge.

I hate that I need to have a bank account to cash checks. I preferred the old days, when you could walk into the bank that had issued the check and trade it for the funds it represented without being charged a cashing fee or treated like you smell of poverty and shame.

Banks are hideously expensive. Banks are rude. Banks charge fees for things they really ought not to. Banks have trained their front line people to dislike and distrust everyone who walks in the door.

Fuck banks. A pox on them all.