The Final Chapter (one can but hope)

I did a bad, bad thing.

After the June ’02 brouhaha with US Bank, I never carried through with the final steps of closing out the accounts, including paying off the checking line of credit. We were working off of our new Safeway Select Bank account, and at first I wanted to let any checks clear, then I sort of, well, forgot. Call it hysterical amnesia, if you will.

So in December, Margie gets a call from Her Favorite People, US Bank. We’re overdrawn on the checking, and the line of credit is maxed out. She is understandably dubious, and then even more understandably, well, torqued when she finds out that, no, I hadn’t actually closed this stuff.

So that night, I stopped at a US Bank on the way home, marched up to the teller, and said, “I want to close this checking account, and pay off this line of credit.”

Everything is going well, and she runs the current numbers, and I write her a check (’cause we’ve got the money still from the re-fi payout), and then she says, “Well, I can’t actually close this until the check clears.”

Ooookay.

“But once it clears, the account will be closed.”

Keen. I walk out the door, free and clear to navigate, and run over to buy some Christmas cards from the nearby Hallmark store, because ours haven’t arrived yet and we’re about to run off to Orlando.

Fast forward to last week. I’m catching up on post-holiday bills that have come in, and notice a US Bank statement, and open it up, expecting to see the notification that everything’s closed and all’s right with the world.

Instead, I discover that … hey, there’s still a balance on the credit line, and still money in the checking account. WTF?

Okay, this one was my goof, because two things happened.

First, at the airport, on our way down to Orlando, I hit the ATM and took out some money. And, looking at the statement, it appears I used the wrong ATM card (problem now solved, but I’d never taken the US Bank one out, and, well, frell, that’s the one that I apparently used).

That transaction hit the same day (Monday) as the checks cleared. The account and the credit line went to zero, then money got sucked from the credit line into the account to pay for the withdrawal. If the helpful bank lady had actually followed through on closing the account, she would have seen more activity on it and been unable to.

(Of course, the bank might have called, or dropped us a note, observing that an account that had been flagged for closure was suddenly being withdrawn from, and had there been a mistake or misunderstanding? But, of course, it wouldn’t be in their interests to have done so. It would have required a customer service mentality. Ahem.)

Secondly, I’d forgotten that there were some automatic withdrawals taking place against that account, for our cable and for the alarm monitoring. That’s why the account had been sucked dry between June and December.

Now, if I had closed the account, and those debits had hit, I’m sure I would have heard from those two firms, and maybe even been hit with a service fee (and righteously so); instead, since the account was still open, they were able to feed off it.

So. Yesterday I contacted both vendors to change what they are drawing out of. I removed the US Bank ATM card from my wallet. And today, post-lunch, I took cash down to the US Bank sorta near my office, walked in, was told by the teller to go see someone at a desk, saw that someone, had the account closed, was told by the someone at a desk to go back to the teller to pay off the credit line (and get back the balance in the checking account), did so, and …

… am, at last, done with them.

It’s moderately annoying that my final encounter here is actually primarily my own fault, though that doesn’t affect the basic suckiness of the earlier experiences. But, as I said, I’m done with them, and glad to be. And, to that end, I’ve moved the various US Bank posts into their own category, for easy consolidated access. Which, except as folks access those posts to make comments, should make this …

… THE END.