A failed and utterly ridiculous attempt to close a bank account

With big banks making more and more money while the people the banks are, on paper, supposed to provide a service for those who make less and less, I took the advice, nay, heeded the call of the Occupy Movement and opened an account at a local Credit Union. That act took about 10 minutes and went smooth as proverbial silk. Closing my bank account, however, was nothing short of a full-fledged and utterly ludicrous fiasco.

I should start by saying that the bank I trusted my money to is not one of the major offenders (Citi, BoA, Chase or Wells Fargo), but it is owned by a major European banking conglomerate and has been gobbling up smaller financial institutions for years, tightening its stranglehold on the public's money. Not that I'm majorly concerned that it wasn't American - we are increasingly becoming a global society by the second and there's nothing I can do stop it at this point. What did bother me was the ridiculous amount of money they have ($65B last I checked), and the fact that they were charging me $15 a month just to have a checking account. Not a huge amount of money to be sure, but that's a ten-spot and a half that I would rather spend on, well, anything except the "privilege" of having a freaking debit card.

So I walk into my local branch to seal the deal and move on. The branch is one of those weird buildings that always seems much larger on the inside than it appears from the outside. It's a long foyer surrounded on either side by small, but not tiny, offices. The bank tellers stand on the wall opposite the entrance, and the drive-thru window is visible from said entrance. But the walk always seems lengthier than I'm sure it is, and they warily watch every time I approach. Maybe it's the tattoos, which are still a bit out of place in suburban Houston. Anyway, they only watch, never acknowledging my existence until I'm right in front of them. I suppose they're hoping I won't notice them and approach another clerk, but that just may be me being paranoid.

Today, however, was different. In my righteous zeal to close my account, I'd raced out of the house without my checkbook. Not that big a deal, I have my account number in my wallet, I just needed to fill out a deposit slip. Of which there were none to be seen.

Finally, since it was obvious I was looking for something, one of the bank tellers asked if she could help me with something. I went into that branch fairly regularly and I'd never seen her before. She was smiling and seemed genuinely eager to help, so I assumed she was new.

"Yeah," I said, "I'm just looking for a deposit slip. I need to cover an overdraft so I can close my bank account."

Her countenance fell. Her smile was gone. She looked at me maliciously, like I'd just kicked her puppy and laughed at the wounded creature.

She told me to sit down and someone would be with me shortly. I didn't dare help myself to a complimentary cup of coffee. God knows what the bank personnel would think of me then. After a short wait of about 15 minutes in a deserted bank lobby, a middle-aged, tall Hispanic woman stepped out of her glass office and bade to me come in.

We made short introductions and she asked, "How can you assist you today?" She too was smiling and pleasant.

I told her that I needed to cover an overdraft and close my account. Her stricken change of demeanor was more drastic than that of the bank teller. This time, it wasn't a reaction of horror and incredulity. It was a look of disgust, like I'd just crapped in her purse and handed it back to her with a grin.

"Oh, God," she groaned as she sat down, "You're not another one of those Occupy idiots, are you?"

Not expecting that kind of treatment by a customer service representative, and a manager at that, I was honest. "Well, I haven't made it down to the protests as often as I like, but I definitely support the cause and the reasons behind it."

"What is the cause?" she shot back. "I just see a bunch of stupid thugs acting like fools."

"Well, there are a lot of things happening that have nothing to do with the real reasons for the Occupy Movement, and some of the things that are happening are beside the point and definitely not helping the cause or people's perception of it. But many of the organizers and spokespeople are very knowledgeable and I think they have a valid point."

She looked at me for a second and said, "My gun says different." This was a such a tangential non-sequitur, I had no idea how to respond. Did a bank branch officer just say "gun" at their place of employment? I guess it was a good thing I hadn't poured myself a coffee. Before I could say anything, she added, "And I will make it my personal mission to see that you never have another checking account again."

"I feel like I was just passively threatened and that I should call the cops," I should have said, and should have done. Instead, I sat there and stared at her for a minute or two. My mouth, I'm sure, was agape. I did manage to get in a smug, "I've already opened another account," before I left, damned if they were going to get any more money from me.

Some of the above is true, some of it hyperbole, but the point is, I feel like - and I'm trying to come up with an original spin on "it's the banks that have the guns pointing at us" metaphor, but I can't think of one, so let's just go with that. Why should I have my financial future threatened just because I want to take my meager funds elsewhere?

Besides, the bank manager is in no way the 1%, so what's her beef with me? Does she get less of a year-end bonus if a client jumps ship on her watch? Maybe. But she acted as though she was affronted by my reasoning for closing my account, not the actual fact that I was attempting to do just that.

Shouldn't she be directing her anger at the executives of the industry she works in that jacked the economy through financially malfeasant (and in some cases downright criminal) acts that caused an economy already so burdened by over-spending that it couldn't afford to lose a dime to collapse in on itself? Shouldn't she be mad about the massive government bailouts, a goodly portion of which ended up lining the personal pockets of said executives. The average pay of bank branch managers is roughly $50,000 a year, according to glassdoor.com. That's a good amount of dough to myself and many of my peers, over-educated for what we are doing, which is mostly settling for under-employment, or worse, nothing at all. But that salary, as attractive as it is to many, puts her nowhere near the 1%. The executives of some the same institutions that cause this fiscal crapstorm to begin with took home millions in bonuses on top of salaries well into the higher six digits.

Get your $15 from one of them, lady.

Hi, Let my introduce myself and this blog

So when I first graduated from high school here in lovely Cypress, Texas and moved to Austin in 1988, I never once imagined I would once again be living in a slightly different house with the same furniture and the same people just over 20 years later. Or that the kindness my parents have shown this aging punk would come back to threaten the very existence they have worked so hard all their lives to build.

My parents aren't rich but they live comfortably and like things just so. Everyday spent with the butterfly called mayhem that is me is another test of my poor mother's sanity and crappy threatening phone calls from student loan companies aren't helping.

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself.

When I moved to Austin to attend UT, the money I made over the summer was enough to pay for fall and spring semesters, which ran around $450 a pop. When I went back in the spring of '06, it was $4500 a pop. And rent had gone up proportionately.

Why go back? Well, being a kid who'd never really been out on his own before, I did horribly in school. I was on academic suspension by the time I was 20. But rather than return to suburban Houston with my tail between my legs, I got a job and continued doing what I was doing: pretending to be a rock star. That I was good at. Actually being a musician, not so much. Oh, sure, I played a bunch of shows, went on a few tours, met some people I still know and others I'm glad I don't. But I was never going to make a living at it. It just took me a while to realize it.

One thing I did learn in those first four failed semesters of college was that I had a talent for writing. Some friends had pulled me into writing for my high school newspaper, but it was at The Daily Texan where I really found encouragement and some "veterans" to show me some ropes. Not that I really used it. I shot every big opportunity square in the face, usually through alcohol-fueled manic behavior.

After a failed marriage that forced me to re-evaluate and settle the hell down a bit, I found some stability in a management position in a smallish Austin business. Soon after that, a small rock and roll mag sprung up from the Red River scene, a street perpendicular to the party central of 6th street that actually encouraged original and diverse forms of alternative music, primarily metal and jazz.

The magazine was called Rank and Revue and it was a rag. Poorly written for the most part and the good stuff was usually a Thompson-esque recap of how fucked up the writer got over the evening disguised as a live rock and roll show review. So of course I heard the Siren call and knew I had to be involved.

I knew, if peripherally, quite a few of the people involved, or it was a friend of a friend thing and we all liked to drink, so I fit in pretty well (which is a rarity for me). I also brought with me at least a collegiate sense of journalistic decor, and amazingly people actually listened to me. It was going along great but being the rock and roll lifestyle loving, fey, whimsical creatures that we were, we could not turn a buck. And there I was, yet again, working a day job while whooping it up at night. But the whooping it up led to something: a magazine. And I thought we were pretty good at doing, it we just couldn't get it to show a profit.

(cue violins softly)

Enter Houston's Joe Claytor and Lila Lieberman. They had run a few mildly successful magazines down here and were looking to get involved in one in Austin. They brought a lot of good things to the table, some of felt. Things like organizational skills, business sense and experience actually putting out a damn magazine. Others felt threatened or that they would lose control or I don't know what, but they split and became another magazine called Whoopsy. That magazine is still around.

Anyway, it looked like things were going great, Joe, a long time buddy and workmate of his Anthony and I had just rented a place together, it was going to be the nerve center for what would eventually be an at least Texas-wide source of entertainment news and other crazy bullshit, creativity was tossed around like confetti on New Years and then Joe was killed in a car accident. So now, the grieving ones are left to do the job of the only person who actually knew what the hell he was doing.

Some of you may be saying the above is included only to elicit sympathy. Perhaps partially, that really sucked, but it is really there to illustrate the dire circumstances that led me back to academia with the dream that it would get me where I wanted to be in the "real world." Bwahahahahahahahahahahahah!

That's when I made the decision to go back to school. It was amazingly easy to re-enroll and the government was great with those FAFSA loans, but how was I going to live, I will admit here, that I could have probably worked, but my plan was to school and freelance without having to report to a job 3-4 times a week. That didn't really work out so well, and so loans were in order so I could, you know, eat and have a roof over my head. And Internet.

But with my credit, how the hell was I going to secure loans? Enter mom and dad and dad's co-signature on some loans from a bank I will not yet mention.

Well, to wrap it up (yeah, I know, whew!) I graduated with a journalism degree (not the brightest field to go into considering the state of the print industry this century but it made sense at the time) in December of 2008. Yup the end of 2008, when the economy went all kerflooey.

I didn't find a job for over a year, which already had me going into default (like I said, my parents ain't rich and I'll be damned they pay for that) but the payments are too high for me to make. The subsidized ones are no big deal - those are consolidated and income-based so it's manageable. It's the private loans that are the nuisance here.

I'm close to my wit's end here. I'm sick of tensing every time the damn phone rings. I want to have enough money to have a regular social life. And I want my poor old parents to quit stressing. They're older and neither are in the best of shape (well, compared to many I guess they are - chalk it up to clean Mormon living).

I'm pretty much to the point of just getting a lawyer and figuring out a way for them to just garnish my wages or something. Or make my payments feasible with my current retail income.

So if anyone has info, advice, word of some part time writing work anything, please, please, please let me know.

This is just an introduction. I'll be back 3-4 times a week with statistics and rants. I know I'm not alone in this. Something needs to be done - you'd think banks would be a bit more humble these days.