>I have 2 banks – one in Germany (as efficient as one would expect) and one in New Zealand.

They’re driving me up the bloody wall.

Forget the fact that they left me without a credit card for a week when I renewed it prior to its expiration date.

(Which is what you do when you’re going to be out of the country when it expires..)

Forget that you tell them to reduce the mortgage principal by $X and they only reduce it by $Y because “the request was misinterpreted”

Forget that you ask them for some investment information and they say they’ll “reply at their convenience”.

Which was a week later.

Forget that they promise to “email me first thing tomorrow” and never do

But this really takes the cake.

Email my consultant to find out why they’ve mysteriously deducted a couple of hundred dollars from my account.

No reply after a full business day, so call up the phone banking people.

Forgotten my phone password, so they ask me the usual questions and then find they can’t tell me anything at all about the mysterious deduction and I should contact my consultant…

While I’m at it, I start asking about how I can reset my phone password.

“Start”, because I only get halfway through the question.

So I start again.

Point out that if I can’t ask the question, it’s unlikely that she’ll know what I want.

Silence.

Deep breath.

Ask the question.

“You can do it online”

Go online, find out that I’m about to change my online banking password.

Call up again, say I want to reset my phone banking password.

Usual questions

Then “And what can I help you with today”

Tell her.

Only get interrupted once

Then she says “Can you give me your online password, please?”

WHAT? OVER THE PHONE? NO! WAY!

This is where I almost give up.

But then I give it one last try.

I get Peter.

Peter doesn’t interrupt, because Peter knows how guys just HATE being interrupted.

Women don’t mind, because they hold parallel conversations anyway and it doesn’t matter to them if no-one’s listening or if someone interrupts.

They just keep talking.

So Peter knows what I want (because he’s been listening), has a solution and in 2 minutes, I’ve got a new phone password.

I wish I could deal with Peter all the time.

Then they’d have a fair chance of keeping my Bag of Money

Which isn’t very high at the moment.