Derek's Blog at Babbly.com

So, last night my bank (TD Canada Trust) decided to, in concert with the CIBC (Crappiest Idiot Bank of Canada), screw me.

See, today is pay day, so naturally, there's absolutely no money left, except for the two $12 cheques I deposited yesterday in order to buy gas to fill my almost empty tank enough to work tonight.  Well, at 2:00 am I get up, and for some reason, I logged into EasyWeb (TD's internet banking service, for those who don't know), and noticed that my account no longer had an available balance of $26, but was actually overdrawn by about $30 beyond my overdraft limit.  Ok, what the hell, I think, and check the account activity.  Hmm.  Cheque for $57.00.  Say what?  I notice the number (100) and grab the chequebook on the desk in front of me, which shows #102.  So, yes, indeed it is one of the two cheques I wrote to one of the kids' schools the other day.  One of the two POST-DATED cheques I wrote the other day.  The ones that are dated for September 20th.  The one they decided to process on September 18th instead.

Great.  So naturally at some point today, I imagine that they'll bounce it and then the rest of the fun will begin.

Anyways, so it's almost 2:30, I'm wide awake now, and *pissed*.  I call the phone banking service and enter my info (and naturally, my phone code no longer works since about a year ago, the last time they replaced my bank card, which never lasts more than a few months nowadays, ever since they started using these new cards with silver mag stripes and not the brown/black kind, the kind that I had before, that lasted about 7 years).  And I wait about 5 minutes for an agent.  (How busy can they possibly be at 2 in the morning?)  As I'm waiting the thing tells me that the call IS being taped for quality purposes.  Super!

So, he asks how he can help me.  I say, well, I just have a quick question, when did the banks stop paying any attention to the dates written on a cheque, and just started cashing them whenever they feel like it?  And that's when I got the whole little speech about automation, and how if it was deposited into a machine, they get millions of cheques every day, might not have been noticed, bla bla bla.  (Translation: the person who is supposed to verify the deposits at the branch the machine was at, or the teller in a branch taking the deposit, is a lazy git and didn't bother  to check the date like they're supposed to.)

OK, now I'm doing a slow burn after hearing that ridiculous little speech, like, did the banks miss the boat on automation or what?  Automation is supposed to make things easier and more reliable.  So, I ask, now what am I supposed to do about this?  I liked his answer even less.  No "I can help you with that", or "I can make a note of this" or "Let me view the cheque on the computer here" (which they can do, I mean, *I* can do it on EasyWeb and get a PDF of the front and back of it, which I did of course).  He tells me that if it does bounce and I am charged an NSF fee, I have to go into the branch (and of course, I'm guessing it has to be the branch my account is actually assigned to, which is in the next city still, 20 minutes away), and have them pull the cheque, and if I am indeed correct, they can credit the fees at that time.  Give me a break!  That's ridiculous.  Which is what I told him, of course.  I commented on how the more they automate things, the worse their service gets, which in my experience has been true much of the time, and he "didn't want to get into that" or something.

I ended the call pointing out that my problem was that now I was late for work, with no money, and no gas in in my vehicle and no way to buy any to actually go to work, etc, and finished with "That's Great, Thanks a lot."   Yeah I guess I was a little rude, not really his fault, but he wasn't exactly helpful either.  Like I want to spent $15 in gas driving to my actual branch to get a $30 credit, which is their screwup anyways.   Well, more the CIBC anyways, since they're the ones that took the deposit and processed it.  Hopefully when it went to TD, someone there at least had a brain enough to honor it without bouncing the stupid thing, which might explain why it hasn't yet.   I'm going to end up spending the rest of the day amusing myself, checking every 10 minutes I bet.

Update:  3:50pm - They finally bounced the cheque.  $37.50 NSF fee.  Idiots.

So, today was the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  It hardly seems like it's been that long.  I guess on a day like today, we all think back, even if briefly, about where we were, and what we were doing, and how we heard the news.  I was thinking about it this morning, going back in my head to where I was, and it was a little hard at first to picture it, simply because it doesn't seem like it's been five years already..  Which is when my original memories of that day started coming back to me.

We were sitting in the living room, getting the kids ready for school, they were just about to leave..   CityTV was talking about what had just happened, a plane hitting the World Trade Center.  I remember switching to CNN and marvelling at the damage caused by the first plane, I think they were talking about it being a small aircraft at first?  Details are so sketchy after all this time.  We were watching the live video of the smoke and everything, and then I remember half jumping out of my seat yelling at my wife "Holy shit, look at this, this is live!  There's another goddamn plane coming, holy shit, someone's crashing planes into the buildings!", which is of course, when the second jet came crashing towards the building.  We saw it live, on TV.

My next comment was something along the lines of "That's it, there's going to be a war" expecting a swift response from the US, at what was clearly an attack.  I wasn't even thinking it was terrorism, I figured with more than one plane, it's a very orchestrated attack, which I figured would be prelude to waking up to a world at war in the next few days.

I remember feeling worried, and a great sense of ambivalence at what was to come.  In less than a few months our son was to be born, and I both feared, and was saddened, at the thought that he would open his eyes and take his first breath, to a world at war.  Of course, things didn't end up quite as drastic as I had feared, but not much better.  The world is definately much more unstable, and will likely continue to be for some years to come.  I'm thankful that things weren't as bad as I had expected them to be.

I still can't help but feeling that in some way, as a whole society, we deserved this, as a wake up call, that the well-off western world can't continue to either ignore the problems elsewhere, or try to impose our values and desires on another society.  Of course, those innocent people who died definately didn't deserve what happened to them, I'm not saying that at all.  I just can't help but feel that maybe we'd been blind to the dangers of what was really out there in the world, waiting for the chance to strike at us all.

It's all still very confusing, even after five years.  May those who lost their lives, or loved ones, find peace.