Shinn the Writer

I never signed up to be a Wells Fargo Bank customer. When I first came to California (gee, that was August, 1980, over forty-four years ago!) I set up banking at Crocker Bank. They weren’t huge and seemed to do all those banky things that I needed done. That is, until Washington Mutual bought them out. Okay, I traded one bank for another. Or they traded me. Eventually, Washington Mutual ran into trouble and when the dust had all settled, I found myself with Wells Fargo. Stagecoach checking and all. Not as cute a concept as the “Animal Crockers” Crocker Bank used to give as gifts to its customers for certain upgrades. I must have been a baaaaaad customer because I never got one.

 

So, I wound up with Wells Fargo which wasn’t going anywhere it didn’t want to go. It was huge, yet seemed to give me good service. Especially their fraud division. I tried to find out if Visa actually ran their fraud investigations or if the issuing bank did. A great mystery until recently. But with great size came great scandal. You may remember that a few years back, some of the really big banks were signing their customers up for services they had never requested and charging for them. Wells Fargo was a huge offender. I swore I’d part company with them.

 

Inertia can be a horrible thing, and I never got around to firing my bank. But recently a seemingly trivial event occurred that made me finally start the process. I needed a local safe deposit box for some of my end-of-life documentation. But the mega-bank had just closed a branch in nearby Berkeley and those safe deposit boxes had to go somewhere. They were apparently distributed around the area and they could not find one closer to me than Richmond or Alameda, either being a half hour away on a good day. Unacceptable.

 

I looked up the hill within easy walking distance, and saw the familiar sight of a small branch of Mechanics Bank beckoning me. Are they auto mechanics? Or maybe appliance servicers like the Maytag Repairman. Or did they require that their customers be mechanics, just like I’m not? Apparently not. They have accepted me.

 

I’ve mapped out all the automated payments from my account as well as the automated deposits. The move from one account to the other should take only a week or so. Then I can close out Wells Fargo.

 

It’s been a bit of a ragged start with Mechanics. My new credit card took an excessive amount of time to get to me, and I still haven’t received my checks. I’ve followed up and they’re on the way. A bigger problem was with my on-line account. It somehow got messed up and I couldn’t get in. That was, of course, discovered on a Friday night going into a three-day weekend. I had to wait until Tuesday to get assistance in setting it up. We started from scratch to do so. But now it seems to work fine. We’ll see.