I really marvel at how it took the banks until now to screw things up again. After all, they are clearly being run by people with the intellectual capacity of amoebas. Why am I so peeved at banks at the moment?
1. I closed an account at Bank of America a few months before leaving for Korea. After they mailed my money to the wrong address, I had to call again to cancel that check, give them my information (which they discovered that they already had) again, and reiterate that I wanted the account permanently closed. When I got back from Korea, I learned that they left the account open with fourteen cents in it and wanted to charge me over a year's worth of maintenance fees and overdraft charges. Needless to say, I will never bank with them again.
2. I put in an offer on a house in Virginia three months ago, and still the bank hasn't gotten around to accepting or rejecting the offer. If they foreclose on the current owners, the bank will spend $60,000, and will not be able to sell for as much as I'm willing to pay. They're hurting themselves, but they apparently have money to burn.
3. I went to my current bank, National City, a month ago to change my won to American dollars. They cheerfully offered me an exchange rate that would have cheated me out of over $1,000. The happy teller also informed me that they would need to charge a fee for this service. I opted to hold onto my won a little longer.
4. I opened an account at Comerica just to be able to change over my won. This was the second week of June. I was told that the money would post to my account in seven to fourteen business days. I checked online again today and called the bank. Guess what - it still hasn't posted. Oh, and since they haven't posted my money, they only have to wait another week and they can start charging me maintenance fees (which is probably their nefarious plot). There's another bank I won't be using again.
I'd like to go spit on Alexander Hamilton's grave right now!
1 comment:
Hi Stephanie,
Sorry to do this in a comment, but I didn't see an email address for you anywhere on the site. I'm a former native English teacher (lived and worked in Korea for two years) who is now a Master's student at the University of Glasgow. I found your blog through the Korean Blog List and the reason I'm writing to you is I'm hoping that you would be willing to complete a questionnaire that forms part of the research I am conducting for my MSc Information Management & Preservation dissertation.
My dissertation will examine the role of blogs in helping to form and shape a sense of community identity amongst expats living in South Korea. This is being done in order to determine the archival value of these blogs and examine if, and how, they should be preserved.
Basically, I believe that today’s archives are rife with personal diaries and papers which allow us a glimpse into the past. But, what of the archives of the future? How many people today actually keep a pen and paper journal or write letters home? More and more native English teachers living in Korea have replaced diaries and letters home with blogs. Furthermore, due to the nature of the native English teacher community in Korea, much of the information about this community can only be found on the Internet on sites such as blogs (like yours). Therefore, a failure to preserve blogs may create a black hole of information for future generations of archives users.
You can read more about my project as well as fill out my questionnaire by visiting http://2009msc.wordpress.com Some of the issues I'm examining are what happens to blogs when their authors decide to stop writing or leave Korea and if blog authors would be willing to have their blogs digitally preserved, so I'd be interested to hear your views on these matters.I’d really appreciate it if you could find the time to complete the questionnaire.
Thank you,
Kim.
P.S. Good luck with the banking situation! I can commiserate,as I had similar problems when I left Korea.
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