Since I'd taken out money I didn't use the card at all and had no plans to do, I didn't check on my account until after coming back from the vet (nearly six at night). Suddenly I was $146 in the red and none of it made sense. The order of everything got switched around and things that had been bought later went through first and none of it made sense anymore. I couldn't figure out what was wrong so I just printed out copies of what online banking was showing me with the relevant portions highlighted and the calculations I'd done so I could follow when the people at the bank explained what had gone wrong.
At the bank the lady I spoke with spent about ten minutes just staring at the pages trying to figure out what was going on, it was pretty obvious it was confusing her. At one point she said to give her some time to make sense of all of it and then stayed quiet for such a long time a lady behind us came up and asked my boyfriend if there was anyone at the desk. After a while she basically said she couldn't see what was causing it all but she couldn't do anything as only the branch manager is authorised to do refunds now as apparently management thought they were doing too many before. She seemed really nice and suggested calling the 800 number if I wanted but she doubted they could help much.
I'm ticked off that I have to wait two weeks to see my money again but the lady was nice and made sure to put a note on my account about it so I decide to just deal with it and put $200 in my account which should cover the fees and leave me with around fifty dollars free. It goes into my account midnight last night but takes a while to process. As soon as its done and has taken the fees out of it leaving $53 so I make a trip to the bank and get out $20. I've never had any problems taking out money after midnight after it has posted but I guess Wachovia was in the mood to rack up fees from me. I check online banking today and have another $70 fee .... for taking out $20 out of $53 and somehow going over.
I call the 800 number because I don't want to go bother the bank lady and have her change her mind about being helpful. The lady there keeps calling me by my mother's name (Mrs. L while I'm Ms. F) despite my telling her my name about two-three times. She explains that it all started with buying gas and snowballed from there. Somehow even though the money from my mom came in it didn't cover the gas money (though it should have been by the money in the account previously - which nobody could explain to me) and everything else got put on hold and caused the fees. Even though I had enough money in the account. Somehow she tried to blame it on me and said "Well you shouldn't have run it as credit, it would have been smarter to run it as debit." Except well ... that's what I've always done. I run as debit, input my PIN and presto we're good. She argued with me about what I did/didn't do though I said maybe the gas machine could have gotten confused or glitched or something. No apparently it's my fault that it ran as credit, didn't post until after all the other things went through even though it somehow held all of them up and caused overages. Finally she agrees to return some of the money and I get $50 back in my account which most of it goes to cover the new fee and leaves $15 in my account.
With the new information about the gas I check over my records again to check for any mistakes I've made. It still doesn't make any sense even if I try to follow their logic. There were about five purchases on hold at the point I still had about $60 left in the account. Three were above $10, one of those being $20. The other two were like $2.55 and $1.04. For one of those I got slammed with a $70 overage fee and I just can't figure it out. Even if I went over, three-four of those should definitely have gone through as I know I had the money. My confusion is definitely not helped when I check the mail this morning and have something from Wachovia telling me that I was getting charged $35 each for going over on two purchases that were both around $5 each. Online banking and the paper the lady at the bank printed for me both show those charges being one of the early ones to go through before the overage mess so it was a total wtf-moment. The other wtf moment is that until that point I thought Wachovia had changed their overage fees to $70 each thing but that can't be because the paper from them says $35 and is dated just this past Friday. So then what's the deal with the three $70 overage fees I've incurred? Argh I'm so confused and definitely am not going to continue banking with them. Once this gets cleared up completely I'm going to a new bank.
Since this is apparently banking issues month I figure I may as well post my MIL's banking troubles with BoA. She got an account there a few months back after spending a good ten years away from banks because of them messing up her account too much. So something happens that I'm not sure about - I think she didn't have enough money in her account? - and they charge her a fairly high fee for it. The teller tells her if she pays around $180 that she should be good so she does and everything's peachy. Until she gets a paper from them saying she owes another $20. Confused, she calls and straightens things out. Apparently the teller was lying and my MIL needs to get that money in by the 3rd of July so she'll be good. It has to wait until her next payday but before then her mother's cancer takes a turn for the worse and she needs to go back to Illinois to be with her. During this time, July 3rd has come and gone and she hasn't paid yet. She comes back to find out she owes another $200 and no amount of explaining gets them to waive the fee or even be the slightest bit sympathetic. I guess that yeah technically it is her fault for her mother dying at an inconvenient time (the funeral will probably be another bad_service post) and that she probably should have kept it in mind before leaving but they shouldn't have been so rude about it and basically act like her mother's dying meant nothing.
Edit: to clarify the reason I'm posting this here isn't because I don't recognize that I made some poor decisions but that some of what happened later while trying to clarify the situation just wasn't making sense. I wouldn't mind (and wouldn't be posting here) if it had just been one or two charges totaling $70 but that each overage was $70 *each* and nobody could explain to me what exactly was going over or why things that had been paid suddenly weren't anymore and why the snail mail overage info I got from Wachovia didn't match up to how much they'd taken from my account at all.
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