Thursday, December 27, 2012

Ending the Year

So at the last Bookclub Meeting of the year, we digressed to the awful banking service in Guyana and sat there deciding which was the least of the evils, when one of the members informed us that Scotiabank had introduced a standing charge per month on her Savings account in August and she promptly marched in and closed the account. They had introduced a ridiculous idea of an inactive account - surely that's a good thing you idiots - that you can use the customer's money to your heart's content at a measly rate of 1% you are still well ahead... so the new charge was $500 per month  on an inactive account.
I had originally had opened the Scotiabank account to use as a primarily business one, but as I could never contact anyone by telephone I quickly nixed that idea: http://gtobserver.blogspot.com/2012/02/awful-service-at-scotiabank.html . I remembered seeing the $500 charge on my last statement and meant to get around to finding out about it -- as the charge was explained I resolved to close the account at the earliest opportunity.
I was taking the Staff out to Christmas lunch and decided to leave the office 40 minutes early, figuring it would be easy as I was told you just had to avoid the tellers and go straight upstairs to the business section. Ha! The young man told me that it was a teller transaction as I wanted to withdraw my cash-- I said I had a number in another bank that the amounts could be transferred to but apparently that still counts as a cash transaction and the tellers had to do it-- after waiting in the queue for 35 minutes, the teller told me it was complicated and would I mind waiting on the side as several supervisors needed to sign off the account. I said yes-- I minded very much and could she speed things up as I was taking everyone out to lunch. It took over an hour with me signing several A4 bits of paper looking like my bank statement and writing the reason three times why I was closing the accounts.  After an hour, the time we were all meeting at the restaurant came and went and I impatiently grabbed all bits of paper and left. On arriving to the office after Christmas I discovered I had the end of a thermal paper roll with the final amount-- no A4 sheet showing any interest - maybe an inactive account means that you don't get interest but have to pay them to use your money? They are so ridiculous I regret I didn't close the damm account 8 months ago!

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