So my never ending saga with ‘the bank of woes’ (herein referred to as ‘BOW’) continues. I guess it’s fair to mention that I’ve never ever known ‘love’ with any bank before. Ever!. What should be a sacred and secure financial union always somehow manages to turn into a nightmare of some sort. One of these days I’ll just pile my money under my mattress, pray that it magically multiplies itself just enough so that I wouldn’t need credit and be done with it! Think of how much I’ll save on interest charges.

Last September I went into BOW to wire money into my mom’s account, which seem routine enough considering I’ve done it 3 to 4 times before. BOW is huge! Probably the largest bank (if you can still call it that) in Canada, listed on the NYSE and into everything; it’s what those fancy-money-types call a ’diversified financial services company’.

Mom’s is one of those ‘reputable’ British banks (could be Asian, who knows anymore!) that’s all over the world with catchy good-feely slogans to make you feel like your money goes to heaven instead of an actual bank.

I never gave much thought to the actual wire process, I go in with all the information they need, someone with a title like ‘Special Assistant to the Wire Transfer Department Specialist’ takes down the information, we chit chat a bit and I’m on my merry way. Three days to a week I call my mom and she’s received the wire. Only this time it didn’t happen that way.

I sent the money in September; my mom didn’t let me know she hadn’t received it till late November (because “she hasn’t had time to check!”). I made sure the money’s truly gone from my account, called the bank, checked the wire information and what do I find? A digit was omitted from the account number on the wire form! That’s when madness ensued!

I storm into the bank and accuse them of starving my poor mother, because as far as I’m concerned it’s their bank person who handwrote an incorrect account number on the form. They rebutted that so long as I sign the form it meant I’d read and verified that all information was correct. I came back with “no one told me that at the point of signing the form”, so they really can’t hold me to that. They said they’d look into it and correct it.

I took my business elsewhere, a relatively smaller bank whose tellers’ inputs your information into their system right in front of you and it’s stored for next time. None of that writing on a piece of paper crap. The money went through!

I went back to BOW and they said they hadn’t heard back from Toronto yet. Toronto??? Apparently wires aren’t done here in Vancouver; the information is faxed to Toronto (headquarters) before the money is sent. A million people explain the complexity of the wire transfer business, they’ll resend a correction, they say.

I give it a couple more weeks, they still haven’t heard from the bank so they’re escalating it. They call; the money should be in my mom’s account now, in fact, they’re closing the case. I check with my mom and there’s no money!

They have me email these numbers to my mom, who takes it to her bank… means nothing to them, her bank claims they haven’t seen any money. BOW sends me another email forwarded from my mom’s bank and a million other places claiming that the money was forwarded to my mom’s local branch back in September. The bank wants my mother to take the information (they sent me from my mother’s bank) to her bank to aid in locating the money.

First of all, my 61 year old mother shouldn’t be chasing some bank around for her money; we have good-for-nothing relatives for that! Secondly, how is it that, two sensible banks can’t get their act together, and put my money where it should be? I think I may have gotten too small for my bank!

PLAYING: Nirvana - The Man Who Sold the World

READING: Diary of a Manhattan call girl – Tracy Quan

WATCHING: 1-800 Missing

QUOTE: “I must have died alone”