Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Piggish Banking

I wish this didn't have to sound like a Nervous Whiner Gets Hit With A Bill type story, but this having happened right after the federal bank bail out can bring it out in people who are normally cool as cream.
Put up with me while I explain.

My auxilliary checking account with, oh I won't say which bank, had been left in a poet's state of limbo. It was opened mainly to do transactions through pay pal and ebay, and my nerdy attempt at being an internet Tarzan mostly flopped. Haven't sold anything on ebay since early post-Bill Clinton.

So I didn't look as eagle-eyed as I should have for a while. The last bank statement tells me I owe the bank $181.00 in overdrafts. They added a nine dollar monthly service charge like mice on cotton, and when the remains of a weak but wiry bank account was all eaten in those fees, they shot out of the bull pen with an $8.00 a day overdraft fee. I slap shotted myself to the phone, with the depressing statement in hand.

The game of phone processing, digitized, shake-the-little-weasel-off-our-tails tactics were as annoying as your last chat with a bank by phone. I managed to get them to close the account and stop the overdraft fees from continuing, and thus growing into a Stimulus Package for Bank Swine. Just now I'm sounding out an F. Lee Baily/Johnny Cochran/Barry Scheck speech to lay on some petulent bank manager. I'm going to ask, nice as Marsha Clark, to scratch the fees and refund the money they stole. With Cochran waiting to get in the game. It should come off at least as good as Lance Ito at a weenie roast for not-well-liked jurisprudentials.

Parting words on the brass agates of banks, they're criminals. Criminals, criminals, criminals, criminals, criminals.

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