(Opinion) I must be allergic to banks and accountants. They seem to bring out the worst in me.
Every time I must deal with them, for reasons I don’t understand, it becomes a great hassle which ends in my blowing my top, almost always to no avail.
The most recent allergic attack came when I was unable to open my account at my friendly Itaú Bank.
The screen said simply that my account had been blocked and to unblock it, I must contact my manager and tell her that this is ‘blocking 408’.
The assumption that a customer, or for that matter, even the manager would know what ‘blocking 408’ meant was over the top.
I had no idea nor did she.
And because my account was blocked. I couldn’t dive in and discover if my meager balance had been stolen or I had won the lottery,
It was a Friday and despite my increasingly aggressive requests, the weekend went by without any movement.
Only on Monday was the account unblocked and I was able to discover there had been “unusual activity” and it had been blocked for security reasons. What unusual activity? No one seemed to know.
And it is not just Brazilian financial institutions.
Perhaps I have been a longtime customer of Bank of America because my allergy tells me that switching banks is worse than enduring the misery of the one you have.
I recently urgently asked my manager in New York for a simple letter affirming that I was a customer in good standing, a seemingly simple task.
Protocols wouldn’t permit him to do that I was told, and I must call an 800 number and officially request it from a special department. Calling that number only gave me a message “the number is unavailable”.
I remember as a boy, going down the main street of our suburban town with my father who proudly took me into “our bank”, and introduced me to ‘our manager’ who shook my hand as if I were an adult and personally opened a passbook savings account for me with a five-dollar deposit.
To the best of our knowledge, there were no ‘blocking 408’ algorithms or protocols for unavailable numbers.
These friendly people took care of their customers, made them feel it was ‘their bank’, and cared for them as they would have expected to be cared for themselves.
The idea that my father might change banks for a higher interest rate, or some other benefit was unthinkable.
That seems like ancient history. We have become prisoners of ‘408’ systems.
I have recently tried to open an account with an investment bank. It is all brilliantly automated.
I carefully filled out all the required boxes of information about myself on the screen until I got to the request for my ‘NIF’.
A ‘?’ page explained that for gringos, a NIF was basically your nine-digit tax number. That seemed simple enough.
But when I entered it, nothing happened. You know the frustration; even anger you feel when you click on a ‘go,’ and you don’t ‘go’ anywhere.
Luis, a genial Carioca university student, the bank’s representative with whom I was communicating assured me we could leap over this hurdle if I just provided some documents.
The only problem was the number of hours needed for him to even get a list of the needed documents.
But none of these irritations fired up my allergy like the battle royal with the August, accountancy firm of Price Waterhouse (PW).
One day many years ago, sitting in my advertising agency office in New York, I received a call from the head of the audit committee of Young & Rubicam, the parent of our smaller agency.
He told me the news that PW had reported that the manager of our Brazilian company had stolen US$11,000 and I was to appear at an audit meeting that afternoon when we had to decide what to do about it.
He seemed not to be able to resist somewhat gleefully reminding me that I had been advised that opening an office in Brazil was too dangerous.
The only thing he could tell me was that PW had said the manager had stolen the money to pay for a ‘caixa d’agua’, a water tower, for his residence and I was to find out whatever I could before the meeting.
I immediately called João, our Brazilian manager and a good friend whom I was certain would never have stolen money, and if he had, he certainly wouldn’t have stolen a large round sum in dollars when all the company’s business was done in cruzeiros.
He said he knew nothing about a R$11,000 payment, but it wouldn’t take him more than five minutes to find out, and he’d call me back.
Which he did moments later. The details were perfect, and the paperwork was spitting out of the fax machine as we talked.
It is said that revenge is a dish best served cold.
When the tight-vested, conservative-suited PW executives got around to what they referred as “the Brazil problem”, I quietly explained with authority that our manager was innocent of their accusations.
How did I know that they asked when they were certain the money had been stolen?
It seemed that a well-meaning staff member writing up the agency’s books quite imaginatively translated ‘Price Waterhouse’ as caixa d’agua’ and the $11,000 was the PW fee for the audit.
I suggested the money had been stolen, but not by our manager. Strange their auditor hadn’t noticed this.
I do wish I could get over my allergy.
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