Jill Murray

I win! I win, I win, I win!

I moved live/work spaces quite some time ago. Let’s say it was two years.

At the time that I moved, I was able to change my address on all 1,999 of my personal and business bank and credit accounts with a few quick phone calls.

Except one.

For some reason, the bank insisted that I had to come into the branch and talk to my account manager to change the address on my business expense card.

To my mind, there were a few problems with this suggestion.

• I do all my banking online. That I even had to phone was something of an affront.
• I had not been to the bank in over a year.
• I was not about to start now.
• If I had an account manager, I had never met him or her and did not know who he or she was, or what he or she did.

So I did the obvious thing and went next door to Canada Post and had a forwarder put on my mail so my expense card statements would reach me anyway, no matter where I chose to live/work.

But then the card expired. Apparently Canada Post won’t forward credit cards in the mail. They have no problem forwarding an ongoing stream of statements containing your personal information and evolving credit history, but a piece of unsigned, unactivated plastic, they’ll withold unless they have the right address.

“You must talk to your account manager in person,” the bank said again.

This continued to strike me as unreasonable. I dislike banking in person. All the people who pretend to help me bank in person were certified to do so in 2006, whereas I have been banking with my bank since the mid eighties. I was around to notice the slide in the late nineties, when suddenly bankers in banks stopped knowing things and started consulting software wizards for everything. In person, I am given bad advice. The bankers make mistakes I would never make myself. I have to look over their shoulders and argue with them. Add in the travel to and from the bank, the long wait for an overbooked appointment, the heat and dry air, and the unpleasant repeating patterns in the industrial low-pile carpet, and it’s just not worth it.

Let’s face it: if I wanted to come in to a bank, I wouldn’t need debit and credit cards.

So I did the only sensible thing and continued to procrastinate over booking an appointment, meanwhile calling them every four weeks to see if they could change my address over the phone yet. I’d had experience this before. Sometimes, if you just wait long enough, policies change for the better all on their own.

That didn’t happen.

But… BUT… almost better, I finally got a hold of someone so new to the bank that he couldn’t see any logicall reason not to change the address over the phone, and he made a clerical error and changed it. And the change was good. I received my card 5-7 business days later as promised.

Jill 5, Bank 0