Last Tuesday, October 31st, I went to the local branch of Bank of America in the hopes of purchasing savings bonds for my niece and nephew. As I mentioned in an earlier posting, I think bonds are a great gift for children under three. When children are that young they tend to outgrow their toys relatively quickly, so my husband and I purchase savings bonds instead.
I went up the counter, stated my purpose, and was told to wait for the next available bank employee to assist me. As I looked around I noticed all of the tellers were dressed in Halloween costumes. Perhaps that should have been my clue that this visit was going to be a very long one.
The employee who finally ushered over to help me was not wearing a costume. I mistakenly took that as a good sign. I say mistakenly because this gentleman was incompetent, truly incompetent. When I told him I was looking to buy savings bonds for my niece and nephew he asked me to give him their names. I had taken the time to write out names, social security numbers, and other pertinent information to make certain the information was transposed correctly. When I handed that information over to the teller, he informed me that he did not want to read what was on the piece of paper, and had me spell out each and every name, social security number, and address letter by letter. He then printed out a confirmation of the order and handed it over to me. Despite the fact that I had spelled everything to him letter by letter, the names and addresses were spelled incorrectly.
This scenario repeated itself a total of six times. I made corrections to the confirmation page and then he retyped the information and printed it back out. All six times something on the paper displayed incorrectly. In fact, on the sixth time the information still appeared incorrectly on the confirmation page but he assured me the information was accurate in the computer. By this time I had been in the bank for 43 minutes, (I know how long I was inside because only 2 minutes were left on my 45 minute meter), so I thought I’d take the employee at his word.
Today the bonds arrived. And surprise, surprise the names listed on the bonds are incorrect, which means I’ll need to go back to Bank of America to have them corrected. Oh I really, do not want to go through all of this all over again. This will be the last time I do business with Bank of America.