Phoning the bank…. aaarrrrghh!

I have just had to ring the bank.

I was after a ‘letter of no further interest’. It didn’t help that I didn’t know what one of those was or even why I wanted one. Nor did I have any other information they required. All I had were a few key words such as ‘mortgage’,  ‘endowment policy’, (neither of which I really understand) and my skills of persuasion, none of which worked.

I was set up for this activity by a certain person to whom I am married, who shall be nameless, but who will from this point on be making ALL the calls to ANY banks we have EVER had dealings with. Either that or he will be supplying me with a more ample set of information to go on.

GRRR! 5 calls to 5 different numbers. And my only ‘success’ was getting past the pre-recorded filtering system before reaching a human being, on all 5 occasions! (Mind you the guy in ‘corporate finance’ wasn’t all that interested in me once he found out I didn’t own a company, so that was only a partial success) At one point I was told I needed to speak to the ‘Relationship Team’ which I thought was very astute given the malevolent feelings I was harbouring towards my other half at the time. (‘Banking crisis brings marital disharmony’, well it makes a change from financial devastation and economic disaster).

Needless to say, it was all a totally pointless, fruitless, a  maddeningly annoying waste of time.  I may as well have been a monkey sent into to fix a failing nuclear reactor, so great was my inadequacy for the task.

I could have told them my name, my address, my date of birth, my NUS number, my NHS number, my library card number, the phone number of our local counselling service (which I may yet require) but none of this was any good. I couldn’t provide the nice ladies in India with any information remotely relevant to my request.  We passed the time of day, established the fact that ‘Good Morning’ was the appropriate greeting, even though it was probably the middle of the night where they are and they were perfectly pleasant and very patient with a person who clearly only had about 1% of the information she required but none of this got me anywhere.

As I said: Grrrr!

Oh dear, another not very ‘feel good’ post, at this rate I might need to rename this blog.