On the Monday morning of Mobile World Congress I was even less awake than usual and I didn't take my credit card back out of the ticket machine, so I phoned to cancel the card. You don't have a credit card, said the unhelpful man; it has a Visa symbol on it and I use it with my business bank account, he said. Oh yes, he said, I've cancelled it and ordered a new one. Except what arrived today was the cash card for my personal savings account. I braved the slightly improved voice jail system and asked Abbey consumer if they could tell me if this new card was a re-issue or just a regular renewal. It's your cash card, they said; we don't know anything else. I phoned Abbey business and they had no record of a cancellation; because Abbey shares a lost and stolen number for both types of account, they had cancelled the wrong one. At this point it becomes one of those good news, bad news jokes:
the good news is the ticket machine ate my card and nobody used it
the bad news is I won't get the new card for ten days and I'll be in the US
the good news is I have a US account to take money out of
the bad news is that Abbey is idiotic enough to link the card so firmly to the online banking system that when they cancel a card, they lock you out of Internet banking until the new one is issued, two days later. So the helpful lady on the phone has written down on a PostIt note that on Wednesday she should remember to unlock my account for me.
To quote tanais when I told him about it, 'I'm not sure some companies should be allowed the internets'. Any recommendations for fee-free business banking that's not this bad?
Broken banking, #2 in a continuing series
-
Robots, fire, solar eclipses: all things we saw at Maker Faire
Maker Faire was a little bit more like work this year as we did more scheduled interviews than usual and concentrated a little more on companies we…
-
CES 2012 in steps and stairs from my #fitbit
Friday we walked from the Riviera to the North Hall to the Hilton to the North Hall to the South Hall to the Central Hall to the South Hall (left…
-
Through the desert to CES
I found out that the areas of Arizona we passed through around Phoenix are known as the Golden Corridor and the deep orange sunset we saw is a local…
- Post a new comment
- 3 comments
- Post a new comment
- 3 comments