SOMEBODY Is Biting Off His Nose to Spite My Face

I received a fine how-do-you-do in the mail Saturday from my Savings & Loan. Isn't that how it always goes? They won't notify you of things that are going to eat away at you when you can pick up the phone and get right to the bottom of it. No siree, Bob! They sent that stuff out so you get it on a Saturday, or a THREE DAY WEEKEND, so you can stew over it until they deign to open again!

Sure, you might thing it was a coincidence that this holiday weekend came at the time a notice mailed on the 1st of the month would reach me. I call shenanigans! There is no such thing as a coincidence! The Universe conspires, my friends. Conspires to thwart Val in her quest to sail through life without leaving a wake, without making ripples, without becoming becalmed. Instead, Val receives a message in a bottle right after she has washed up on a deserted beach. Even though she may have a plethora of plastic bottles and plastic six-pack-connecting rings with which to build a fire and send smoke signals, nobody is watching from the mainland. Oh, no. They are all out having a three-day-weekend celebration with ill-gotten gains accrued from Val's account.

I received a notice saying that one of our two savings accounts with this institution had been inactive for 12 months. And to prevent fraud, they were declaring it dormant to keep ne'er-do-wells from tampering with it, and the only way to re-activate the dormant account was to make a deposit or a withdrawal. If I didn't, then my account would be charged a fee of $1 per month for being inactive!

Whoa, Nelly! How does my money, laying in that virtual vault, being used by that institution for investments, earning me about 0.15% interest per year, cause them any work? It's not like my balance sits there as a pile of pennies that must be counted each day. Nobody is having their workload increased to look after my balance, which is nothing more than numbers on a computer. I do think charging me $12 per year is a little steep. It's MY money (okay, Hick's money and mine, but it wouldn't be there if I wasn't good at squirreling it away all these years). Yet the Savings & Loan has full use of it. So they're actually charging me to let them use my money!

Well! I was off to that den of extortionists first thing this morning, like Jerry's Nana off to her bank branch to cover the checks she'd been writing that her bank couldn't cash. I've never had any troubles with this Savings & Loan in the 20 years we've been using them. In fact, they bent over backwards when we still had a house loan, to insure that, even thought fixed, it received a better interest rate each year than the whatever-you-call-it rate set by the feds. Never have we gotten a notice that our accounts are being charged for being inactive.

Just so you're clear...the Savings & Loan wanted me to make a withdrawal (surely you don't think I'd deposit MORE with those strong-armers!)  to reactivate the account so they didn't have to charge me $1 per month to let it sit in their computers as a number. Which meant they would have less of my money to have their way with. I don't get it.

So...I went into that office with my letter. Told the teller (heh, heh, is that some kind of irony?) that yes, she COULD help me. And proceeded to withdraw $1000 from that account, and deposit it in my other account. Oh, I could have only withdrawn $1, I suppose, to keep my account active. But that seemed picayune.

Like making people pay to save money in a Savings & Loan.