Happy Monday everyone! Long time no talk. Lots of reasons – none good – so I’m committed to posting more regularly now. I was waiting for the redesign and then that got all messed up. Then I was waiting for a thing at work to end and then that keeps going. So I’m just going to get back to posting. Before I get into it let me warn you that when I wrote this post, I was blogging angry – not a good sign. Anyhow here we go. But I didn’t want to post this until today because I figured it would be fun to let the blogging begin anew on a Monday morning!
Disclaimer: I changed a few non-relevant facts a bit to protect the teller in case Bank of America finds this post and tries to find the transactions in their system and tie it to the teller.
Background:
For a number of reasons, my wife and I have joint and individual checking accounts. It’s a long story and not really relevant to this post. I may have posted about it before but I’m not sure. If not, maybe I’ll write a few words on it someday.
More Background:
My wife rocks! She’s really good at stretching a buck or two. Recently she found a great rebate on some groceries, but the catch was that we needed to wait for a rebate check for a couple of bucks in the mail. We got the check a couple of weeks ago. It was made out to her. So she signed it and handed it to me to deposit.
When things got silly:
We bank at Bank of America, which has been called a “BOA” by some angry personal finance gurus. Normally I don’t mind them even though they’re a big bank. I prefer local, regional or smaller banks – or credit unions – but I’ve been giving them a break because they have generally treated me well. There are definitely a few exceptions, but that’s ok. This was one of the exceptions:
I grabbed the check I walked into the local branch to deposit it. I tried to use the ATMs but my card wouldn’t read for some reason. So I went to a teller. I asked to deposit the check and gave her … GASP!!! … my individual account number (again long story, but that’s where the money belonged).
This is what went down (paraphrased – it was a very calm conversation in case you’re wondering):
Teller: We can’t deposit the check into your individual account.
Me: Why not?
Teller: Because the check is made out to [your wife].
Me: No it’s not. It’s made out “to the order of” my wife. It is signed over to me on the back.
Teller (not even looking to see if it was): That’s not how it works.
Me: Are you sure about that? I’m pretty sure that’s exactly how it works. We do this all the time.
Teller: I need to see her ID.
Me (realizing I wasn’t getting anywhere with this and just trying to save the rest of my day): OK. I know it’s not you (Note: I’m pretty sure it was her.), but you realize how silly this is? I could transfer the thousands of dollars that are in that joint account out right now to my individual account and then close my account. Then my wife wouldn’t be able to get that money back, right? But I can’t deposit a couple of bucks into my individual account?
Teller (this was great): But you can’t transfer these couple of bucks until the check clears.
Me: You would agree that there are more than a couple of bucks in my individual account that you could use to hold against the check that’s been signed over to me, right?
Teller: It doesn’t matter.
Me (giving up): OK. Again, I know it’s not you, so let’s just do this, which I realize is also silly. Let’s deposit this check into the joint account. And then please transfer that amount from the joint checking account to my individual account. You see how silly this is?
So she did.
Note: I was actually using the word “silly.” We were both being very calm and polite. It was probably a couple of minutes of conversation – at most. It was just really frustrating for me -(probably for both of us…). I just thought if I pointed out how silly the apparent “rule” was she would realize that maybe she was mistaken. I thought wrong. I got my receipts and went on my way – with a couple of extra bucks in the banks… 
Seriously Bank of America? Seriously?
Would anyone else be frustrated by this? How would you handle it, especially if you had a simple solution like the deposit/transfer?
Note: I didn’t want to do the transfer myself, which I also could have done and saved myself the conversation – but then I guess I would have lost a lot of the meat of the post, although I wasn’t thinking about that then.
Until next time, put your credit card down and slowly step away from the mall!
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Image: Witthaya Phonsawat / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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