Saturday was Quebec day which was a giant pain in the ass cause they removed all of the garbage cans from the park (apparently the Montreal police are deathly afraid of garbage can fires when it’s 30 degrees, hot and sunny). Anyway in the spirit of ‘how all things impact me’ this really sucked because there was nowhere to dump the dog-pooh bag on Sunday morning.

They say that golf is ‘a good walk spoiled’ yeah right, try walking for 45 minutes in the hot sun with a hoard of flies following behind trying to get at the delicious pooh entre you’ve so cruely packaged in a seemingly inpenetrable Provigo bag…that’s a good walk spoiled.

Anyway, even though pretty much everyone had the day off on Friday I got yesterday off instead which was great cause everything was actually open for a change.

So Bert and I went to the bank. The bank has been putting a hold on my pay cheque ever since I first started getting it. I argue with them every month but it doesn’t seem to help (and no, my employer has never bounced a pay cheque). The last time they finally promised that they wouldn’t hold my checque and then, after I went ahead and deposited it, they proceeded to put a whopping three week hold on - without telling me! During that three weeks they:

1) charged us the monthly fee even though the cheque they were holding more than covered the minimum balance to have the fee waived

2) charged us interest on bills we paid from our overdraft account because they were holding a cheque that would have more than covered the bills

3) offered us a no-annual fee credit card and then charged us a $99 annual fee

4) reimbursed our falsly charged interest and monthly fee to someone elses account

So yesterday Bert and I went to the bank to sort everything out. Bert started to get justifiably stroppy when the woman said that even though TD signed us up for the credit card, TD Visa is a completely seperate entity…we would have to take up the annual fee issue with them on our own.

First bank-related question: Why is it that banks never take responsibility for their actions?

Anyway after a full half hour of painful sorting through all things financial, we finally had resolution. As we turned to leave the guy who had taken over our fiasco called us back.

“Wait a minute, you don’t have overdraft protection.”

“No, we canceled it after you charged us $19 interest while the cheque was on hold.”

“Oh, I’ll put it back on your account.”

“Uh, no thank you.”
“Ok, I’ll give you this different overdraft program.”

“No, we really don’t want it.”

“I’ll just add it to your account just in case.”

“No, seriously we don’t want it.”

“If you don’t use it we won’t charge you.”

“We still don’t want it.”

“If you’re not being charged what do you care if you have…I’ll just give it to you.”

“No!”

Second bank related question: Why don’t banks understand that no means no?

I am seriously considering burring all of our money under the back deck. Oh wait, now I’ve told you. Well in that case, I would never, ever, in a million years consider hiding our paltry life savings under the back deck!