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To: Smogger

Whoa. Fustercluck.


2 posted on 07/28/2004 8:41:23 PM PDT by martin_fierro (Zydecodependent.)
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To: martin_fierro
Whoa. Fustercluck.

It could be worse...

Several years ago I was using the CheckFree service to pay my bills electronically. It normally worked flawlessly, but one month they had a system hiccup (they blamed it on recent Y2K changes they had made), and it repeated my July payments in August (and did the same for countless other customers).

Normally this wouldn't have been too big of a deal, but as luck would have it, in July I had taken out a bill consolidation loan, and paid off a bunch of credit cards. When those payments were "cloned" into August, the net result was that I instantly ended up many thousands of dollars overdrawn, and received dozens of overdraft charges totalling nearly a thousand dollars.

To add to the "fustercluck", not only could I not withdraw any cash from my bank to buy groceries, etc. (and my nephew had just arrived from Canada, we had planned to do touristy things with him, and those take money), but my freshly paid-off credit cards were unusable in the interim because the repeated payoffs to them had bounced (for obvious reasons) and the credit card companies put holds on the accounts.

So there I was with my bank account overdrawn, my credit cards on hold, leaving me no way to withdraw pocket money for any reason.

To add to the screwups, a year or so prior to that, my bank had changed their routing numbers, and when CheckFree finally sorted out the mess and tried to credit my money back to me, the wire transfer bounced because they still had the old routing numbers.

It took almost two weeks before the mess was straightened out, and CheckFree ended up paying all my bounce fees, wrote letters to all creditors and financial institutions involved explaining that the bounces were their fault, and in no way mine, sent me a letter personally signed by their CEO, and sent us a huge mail-order cookie basket (from Cheryl & Co., nice place) to try to atone for the mess.

All in all, having my information "locked" for a few days would have been nothing in comparison.

50 posted on 07/29/2004 1:33:58 PM PDT by Ichneumon ("...she might as well have been a space alien." - Bill Clinton, on Hillary, "My Life", p. 182)
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