I loved your book! I loved the way it reads. So fluid and interesting.
Related to an earlier comment I posted on a different thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41316889 , I didn't name the "national bank", but I now feel perfectly comfortable outing "Citibank" as the national bank that I will no longer (personally) do business with. Corporate stuff is a different matter.
As a matter of policy, they do not empower their front-line (personal) banking CSR reps, and even 1st-level escalation folks. They're basically nothing more than stenographers.
After 20 days of back-and-forth with non-answers, I finally sent them a certified letter giving them 30 days to "take action" or "explain non-action" on a specific dispute amounting to ~$5k.
The responded with a non-reponse bizarre marketing letter in 10 days.
I called to verify the prior letter was "on-record" in my account. Given the nature of the postage, it was already verified delivered.
Moving forward, that 15 year+ line-of-credit is just going sit on their books until they close the account. There is no longer a fundamental basis of forthright communication, confidence in competence, and trust to move forward.
This appears to be the original sin in most of these scenarios.
Eventually, automation and predictive analytics will break.
If you do not have a customer service org empowered and staffed to (a) investigate what went wrong & (b) make it right, then you will lose customers.
And maybe you're fine with that trickle, but know that the Kafkaesque burning of a relationship means they will never do business with you again.
For all its faults, Amazon is an example of a company that still remembers this and seems to empower its support folks. As a counterexample, I severed a 20 year relationship with Bank of America because they disempowered their retail staff to the point of uselessness.
Even though it wasn't their fault and they could do nothing, at the time, to source the medication, I received instant credit (very expensive med) and they even talked to my insurance (with me on the line) to smooth-out the instant re-issuance of the prescription with an alternative vendor.
> The responded with a non-reponse bizarre marketing letter in 10 days.
>I called to verify the prior letter was "on-record" in my account. Given the nature of the postage, it was already verified delivered.
What was the purpose of the certified letter? you can use that in court but did you take any further action?
The purpose was to layout an explicit log of prior communications and the terms of any/all communications moving forward (only physical mail), actions they needed to take if they wanted the account to remain active, and a time frame under which they needed to take those actions. Franky, just bog-standard financial dispute stuff.
Cleaning out my attic last month, I just found a stash of punch cards left over from the 1980's. Some paper-tape that has my phd dissertation. And a fortran manual from my high school's IBM-1620. Oh my...
I appreciate the time you put into writing it — and the nostalgic enjoyment it brought me.
Thank you.
All truth is one. In this light may science and religion labor here together for the steady evolution of mankind from darkness to light; from prejudice to tolerance; from narrowness to broadmindedness.
https://library2.buffalo.edu/archives/campuses/detail.html?I...
Yeah, we had another issue with Chase like yours and the article's. Finally got around to letting Chase know that a family member had died, took a little while, because, duh. We were all on the accounts together. So, Chase then goes and makes us all down as dead. Freezes everything, then started up the process to put up the money for probate to our various estates (?!). Luckily, we get daily emails about this and were able to go and start everything back up again. It's still no where near finished up, after about 5 months of weekly visits. They managed to make us undead in their system, but then a week later it would revert. No one ever knew what was going on and still don't. Eventually managed to get a check of all the cash in the checking and savings accounts and have gone and put it all with a local credit union. However, about $120k of retirement savings from my dead family member are still locked up in Chase. No amount of records from the county or newspaper obits or hospice forms can convince Chase that the deceased is actually dead. They, and I am not joking here, said that my family member has to sign off on declaring their death to Chase.
Chase, never again.
I want to be clear to the other readers here: This is your warning that 'something is rotten in Denmark'. When another large fiscal crisis starts up again in ~3 years, you'll now know it's because these banks have become too big to operate, not just fail. Cleaning out that mess is going to be a lot harder than 2008, as all their internal records stink.
The good news for this is that my primary stock has gone up 80% (since this issue became apparent, just two years ago), and it has encouraged me to live more frugally. Eventually?
Unrelated: thanks for the awesome Klein Mug, Cliff!
This happened at my previous house, except with an additional twist: the street name was changed to an identical streetname, less than a mile away, but within a different city.
Adding to the confusion, my address was duplicated on that other street with a commercial brokerage which often gets sued. How do I know about these lawsuits? — because several process servers showed up (over about eight years living there) to sue the other address. They never believed my factual explanation: the numbers repeat on the same road, so closely ("yeah, ok buddy").
Only once did the process server actually look on his phone to see that there were in fact two same-addressed properties (and obviously mine was residential).
Are you still doing the hats & bottles or did you retire from that too?
At the moment, retirement mainly means "start taking out required minimum distributions".
All the same, I wonder: How do you retire from a marginally profitable nano-business built upon glass mathematical shapes? How'd I ever reach 74 years old?
And 'The Cuckoo's Egg' was a great read.
Thank you for being you.
Sell signed copies of your books for $1000 at the klein bottle store so we can buy them. Let us help you have fun in your retirement! (A signature or signed bottle would be awesome too.)
... actually, that might be safer so as to not raise any red flags with Citibank. /s
:)
Glad you got things straightened out.
Yesterday's SMBC made me think of you: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/outside
At least I know never to do business with Citi.
Try a credit union if you want to avoid banks.
I've never tried one, but I assumed the level of bureaucracy must be similar in order to defend against fraud and fulfill regulatory requirements.
I can walk into my credit union's offices - they have just two branches - and talk to someone with decision making power. An actual human being picks up the phone if I call. Their customer service has been impeccable despite some complex asks.
I am unlikely to be able to do this if someone steals my crypto.
(My security question when calling in was once "you sent an email last week that made my boss very happy, what was it about?")
Cons of a credit union: many processes are still manually-controlled
There's a lot of scenarios where that's the lesser of two evils, though. And god it's nice to be able to walk into a branch, explain the situation to someone, and get "Let me see what I can do. There, all fixed" in reply.
Instead of "Oh, the system won't let me do that."
This is a medium sized credit union, with a dozen or so branches.
At that level of assets, you're usually not thousands of branches, it's probably just tens, and the organization is small enough to be based on empowering people to use their brains as opposed to strict script following and zero thinking.
Credit unions are a bit more flexible than a small bank though, because of shared branching. It's not as good as they say it is, but you can go to selected other credit union branches and get limited teller services.
I had to give my origin bank everything imaginable, including address, phone, fax of both the destination bank as well as the branch.
All of my ID obviously and the destination account number.
Weeks later I get a message from my destination branch saying they got some money in USD for someone that had a subset of my name but no account information whatsoever.
I said it was for me and thankfully that was it.
What happened?
Eventually I got something that looked like a traceroute of the transfer.
The origin bank used Citibank as an intermediary and at that step everything but the amount, name of the destination bank and my first and last name was lost.
Completely obliterated.
Never trusted them ever since.
I've known people who couldn't get their name into the system (no last name), couldn't fit their names into the system (two last names, no hyphen), changed family name (spouses), change first name, put in a different first name (sometimes Timothy, sometimes Tim), their name didn't _fit_ in the field (too many characters, unexpected character encoding), trans people.
This should be expected by computer systems, and expected by staff.
I had about $80,000 in IRA/CD's. I'd created & contributed to them over a period of 35 years.
Last year, it's time to retire, and Citibank won't give me half the money. It seems that some CD's are for "Cliff Stoll" and some for "Clifford Stoll".
Citibank Retirement demanded a "Marriage Certificate, Divorce Decree, or Court Order" to demonstrate that "Cliff Stoll" is the same person as "Clifford Stoll".
Took more than 8 months, dozens of emails, five visits to Citibank offices, and a letter to the Citibank president, to shake loose money that I'd deposited across three decades.