Thursday, October 2, 2008

a soggy day

What's worse than soggy Life cereal? Bank managers that don't call you back.

Charrow and I have been trying to pull together the many forms and letters needed for the sublet application for our prospective apartment. Things were moving along nicely (glowing reference letters poured in) until Monday when we stalled out at Bank of America. The branch manager put in a request for my reference letter last Thursday. As of Monday, it still hadn't been processed. We left the bank Monday afternoon disgruntled and stressed out about our dwindling timeline.

Today I called the bank and the manager just happened to answer the regular customer service line (her direct office phone must be routed to some financial dungeon below the bank's safe). She told me she had to check the fax machine and that she would call me back. A word to the wise: never agree to a call back for a task that can be accomplished in 45 seconds.

About 30 minutes before the bank closed, I made Charrow take me there to wave my ace bandaged arm in someone's face until a reference letter materialized. The manager swooped over when we walked in and she said, "Oh I haven't forgotten about you! See, here's my note to call you right here! We don't have the letter, but we're going to call and check on it right now!"

Tell me, how was I supposed to know she hadn't forgotten about me when she never called me back?? I 'm horrible at following through on my bark, so there was no arm waving, but we did leave with a freshly faxed 4 sentence letter stating that I do indeed have 2 accounts with Bank of America. I hope the co-op board frames it when they're done reviewing our application.

3 comments:

Desembarazarme said...

As someone who regularly deals with clients, I can tell you that jumping to say, "I haven't forgotten!" and then proving that by showing a reminder, but NOT THE ACTUAL REQUESTED ITEM, that pretty much means, "I forgot! Holy fuck! Let's do it now"! Because I do that sometimes. So yeah--she forgot.

P.S. Life cereal ALWAYS gets soggy. Why???

P.P.S. Thanks again for the cookies. I enjoyed my second one today.

eje said...

What other uses could you put your bandaged arm to? If you added an eye-patch, maybe you could attain a high-enough sympathy threshold to get someone to sell you a speed boat using your life cereal as collateral.

Spinning Ninny said...

Dude, that sucks. Glad you got it though!