Comedy of errors

Monday, 4:30 pm

By Kate

Sep

25

2006

This afternoon my brand new debit/ATM card arrived in the mail. Hallelujah! I walked outside and plugged the thing in my bank’s conveniently located ATM machine. It refused my transaction saying the pin number was incorrect. Well, okay.

Stopped at the bank on the way home and told them I needed to assign the card a new pin number. No problem, they have a little machine that does it in just a minute or two. With that taken care of, I walked out into the lobby and tried the ATM machine again. It took my pin number and spit a crisp $20 bill out at me. Cool!

Then the receipt popped out and the balance was...oh several orders of magnitude lower than it should have been. In fact, it looked exactly like the lad’s spare change balance before I deposited $20 into his account this morning. Funny, that.

I walked back in the bank and both the manager and the other desk person were busy. So I told one of the tellers that it appeared my brand new ATM card was for the wrong account. My son’s account. NOT mine. She filled out a form with the correct account numbers and had me sign it and told me my new ATM card would arrive in the mail in about 10 days.

So, let’s recap. I placed my first order on September 1st. On the 13th I wandered into the bank to find out where my new card was. Lo and behold...the order had never been processed. So they reordered the card and told me it would be another 10 days. It actually turned out to be 12 days, but what are two days among friends. Add another 10 or 12 days to that and now we’re looking at October 5th or, possibly, October 7th. That’s a heck of a long wait for a debit/ATM card.

As I started to leave the bank, the manager’s customer walked away so I plopped myself into her chair and said, “I am not a happy customer.” I told her the situation and said that I did not want to wait another 10 days for a card. I want one now. Today. I’ve waited long enough.

She agreed and said, “I can fix it right here. No problem.” Huh? How come the teller didn’t know that? In any case, she did something on her computer and reassigned my brand new card to my account and told me to go try it in the ATM machine in the lobby. It worked! Perfectly. I redeposited the first crisp $20 back into the lad’s account.

Wasn’t too long after I came home that I received a panicked phone call from the lad who said that his pin number isn’t working any more. What’s he supposed to do now? I told him to try mine and get back to me. He did and my pin number worked. We will both have to redo our pin numbers. He’ll have to wait until he comes home for Christmas, but I suppose the one I assigned to the card when it was “his” will do for now.

Man, what a comedy (Unfunny) of errors.