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Oliver Cross: Twitter and bungling banks
Woodhouse's own star columnist Oliver Cross talks Twitter and bungling banks.
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What a tweet!
My friend Claire, who is not only my friend because she's the bar manager at the Chemic Tavern in Woodhouse although obviously that helps, was tapping away on her laptop in the pub this week.
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This was during a quiet period, which are rare these days because since I exclusively revealed recently that the Chemic Tavern is a real place and not a figment of my imagination, people have started going there.
But there was Claire, her brasses all polished and nobody in need of service, enjoying a little private laptop time while making strange high-pitched noises at the keyboard.
Eventually, I had to ask: "What are you doing?"
"I'm tweeting."
"Ah," I said, feeling on top of things for once, "you mean you've joined the social networking and micro-blogging site used by Stephen
Fry among others, where people express a wide range of views to one another using no more than 150 alpha-numeric characters?"
"No, that's Twittering. I was tweeting."
"So that'll be a new thing then, is it better than Twittering? Can I join?
"You can't, I was tweeting in the sense of making noises like a bird, such as 'tweet tweet' and please don't ask me why" (I was just about to ask Claire why) "it's just a thing I like to do and unless you want to
buy a drink, can you please stop interrupting me (tweet)?"
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Which is where the conversation lost its momentum.
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Driven to distraction by bungling bank
This week I've been preoccupied by a letter from my bank which told me I was 10,300 overdrawn and muttered dark threats.
They told me "it is important this matter is resolved", which I took to mean that they wanted the 10,300 pronto and don't try to mess us about sunshine, and that if I had difficulties finding the money, I would be invited to meet certain members of the bank's staff who were highly experienced at arranging repayment plans, mainly, I guessed, through sticking pins into customers' eyeballs.
But I wasn't at all worried because it was obvious that the bank had made a very silly mistake to do with the money left to me by my mother, which I had rather hoped to hold on to for sentimental reasons, being very fond of my mother's money.
So I telephoned the bank's Collection Centre to explain that instead of investing the money, as instructed, the bank had somehow doubled the sum and then abstracted it from my account, even though it wasn't there to begin with.
I did think that this might have been a very clever Mr Madoff-type scam, but as the week wore on and I spent hours running up blind alleys and listening to recorded messages saying the lines were busy and thanking me for my patience, I concluded the bank couldn't possibly organise a scam because it couldn't organise a bank account, which you would have thought might have been one of its strengths.
And what were they talking about, 'thank you for your patience'? The telephone was surrounded by evidence of lost patience – torn-out hair, smashed coffee mugs and traumatised cats. It annoyed me as much as the sign 'Thank you for not smoking' did when I used to smoke.
Listen, matey, saying 'thank you' to somebody you can't talk back to because you are a recorded message or a sign isn't too clever, is it? It might make you feel you're being taken for granted.
Anyway, back at the Collections Centre the conversation was veering from bad to sub-Kafka. I explained the mistake to a young (I decided) man and he said he could see there might have been an error but I would have to sort that out with the bank and he needed the 10,300 by tomorrow.
"Can't YOU sort it out with the bank," I asked with remarkable calm and logic. "I mean you are the bank, aren't you?"
"Yes, but I'm Collections. We're different."
"Well, could you put me on to someone who could sort it out?"
"No, I'm Collections. We do collections."
OK then, I said while counting slowly to 10, which, incidentally, doesn't work under this degree of provocation, what should I do? The
Collections man reminded me that he would have to collect the money very quickly and surely I had 10,300 somewhere.
I asked him whether, even though he was Collections, he had access to my bank accounts, and he said he had, and agreed that there was nothing like 10,300 available to me.
"But," he added, " have you got a credit card from another bank?"
"No."
"Are you sure, have you checked? Or maybe you know somebody with a credit card – they could give you 10,300, couldn't they?"
"NO, argh...oo, I think I've cracked my head against the wall, have you got a bandage?"
"No, I'm Collections."
And only the very last bit was made up but everything worked out right in the end ("we'll just phone this afternoon to confirm that we've put it all down to a bank error," they said the last time I heard from
them, which was four days ago).
I think if I was a man not a mouse, I would try and contact my bank (I've got a two-week holiday coming up, so this might be possible) and threaten to move to a more reliable bank unless they give me a three-figure sum in vouchers, for Marks & Spencer for preference but Primark would do because I don't expect much and anyway that threat about moving to a more reliable bank was clearly a bluff. I mean, are there any reliable banks?
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Weather for Leeds
Saturday 19 May 2012
Today
Light rain
Temperature: 6 C to 10 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: North
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: 7 C to 12 C
Wind Speed: 14 mph
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