Buck At War

In order to provide the faithful with quality blog entertainment, Buck 99 decided to use a pair of enclosing quotation marks to get around the self-imposed 3rd person rule enforced on this blog.

The following excerpt is an email Buck sent to his enemy du jour, a company that is making it difficult for him to close a long-dead account, and who has instructed him that he should visit a branch:

“Dear [Evil Credit Card Company #1],

I will visit a branch, but I am displeased. I called the number you provided and was forwarded to [Evil Credit Card Company #2]. The call was disconnected but fortunately the [Evil Credit Card Company #1] agent had given me the phone number before attempting the transfer. Then I proceeded to call [Evil Credit Card Company #2] three times and was ultimately disconnected from each of those calls in three separate and distinct ways before making it to a single human being. All this taking time away from my day for an account I neither use nor want, and in fact believed to be already closed.

I suspect that the process has been intentionally engineered to make closing an account difficult. I include both [Evil Credit Card Company #1] and [Evil Credit Card Company #2] in this accusation. I also detect from your response that you haven't even looked at my account. The phrase "if the account balance exceeds $2500" gives it away. The balance is ZERO. The account has been dormant for years. Nice form letter, guys. Thanks for spending $0.25 servicing your customer with a pair of button clicks.

If the branch approach fails, then I may be forced to close the account by mail, but there is no way that I will pay a fee for that "service." How am I to ensure that my $20 won't be applied to the membership fee? Perhaps this is what happened the last time I tried to close this account.

No, I have a better idea. If the branch approach fails, I go to the Better Business Bureau and the SEC, with carbon copies for my senators and representatives at both the state and federal levels. I have personal experience with the success rate of this approach, having once been professionally responsible for responding to complaint letters forwarded to my major credit card corporation employer from these sources.

I've worked in the credit card industry for eight years and know how to ultimately win this engagement. Make it easy on yourselves and pave the way for me to close this account quickly and absolutely free of charge. No membership fee, no closing fee. You'll never get them from me, and you'll end up having to spend way more than $20 just fighting me and reversing any damage you do to my credit report. Expensive call center reps will experience very long talk times, and their supervisors and managers will end up on the phone a lot too. And the longer this takes me, the more I'll make sure it affects your bottom line. I'm already highly annoyed and frankly amazed that I have to physically go to a branch for this. This is the 21st century and I have to travel to close an account that has no balance? Are you kidding me? The manager there will get an earful, and I'll only just be getting started.

Since my statements say "[Evil Credit Card Company #1]" and not "[Evil Credit Card Company #2]", my battle is with you, not them. If you want me off your back, you will be my intermediary. You will do what is necessary to get [Evil Credit Card Company #2] to close this account (assuming your agent was speaking truthfully about [Evil Credit Card Company #2] servicing the account, but if you haven't noticed, I'm finding it challenging to trust you at the moment).

Good luck.

Regards,

[Buck 99]”