I have had an interesting week, both emotionally and mentally. I had probably reached the low point of my slump. Some projects that I was contemplating were not quite… smart, I guess would be the word. Video games and depression had taken up approximately 4 days out of my week. Oh, and Firefly. Those sixteen hours were fun.
My crazy idea involved attempting some kind of moral stance with my bank. I had reached a point where I felt like I didn’t really have much to lose and I was willing to put a lot on the line. After giving in to the system that was designed specifically to encourage me to fail and losing about 25% of my income to Washington Mutual every pay-check, I had decided that something needed to be done. My final straw was when I sent a check out on Oct 3rd. After receiving an eviction notice on the 8th to vacate the premesis by the 11th I had lost all faith in whatever it was that I was supposed to be having faith in.
With the realization that I may no longer have a place to live based on the actions of my bank, their “delivered by” field had suggested no later than the 8th, I came to the conclusion that I may as well go down fighting. I had this fantasy about what I wanted to do. My fantasies are just that… fantasies. At times, I am sure that my life would benefit more if I learned the secret to making some of my fantasies realities but this was not one of those instances.
The basic plan involved making it to the bank and having a little talk with a manager. I had hoped to have this interaction recorded somehow so that I may review it at a later point in life and see if I was right or wrong. My point was to have a little speech delivered to the manager and provide an ultimatum in which they could make a decision as to my fate. Banks are corporations that think they are people and thusly, think they develop policies that enforce a system of ethics that, to a corporation, are good and beneficial to the society of which they are a part.
My reasoning is that this is complete bull-shit and corps do not have the same needs as a human being and they never will because they do not need food, air, water, and any of the other needs that humans have. Corps need money, human labor, and resources from the earth. Two very conflicting philosophies. As a result, policies regarding human interaction are applied and later enforced regarding what a corp feels is ‘right’. Soon this shifts into law because a large enough percentage of the population have been practicing these policies in ‘ethics’ for long enough that it is a simple matter for most forms of government to agree to make concessions to protect its “Citizen’s” right to the pursuit of happiness.
Because of such a fundamental difference in how this legal fiction interacts with a society, we end up in the kind of situations that I found myself in. A bank employee telling me that by allowing me to spend money I don’t have, which we tend to call Credit, they are protecting me from making a mistake and protecting me from spending more money than I can afford to spend. To top it all off, this human being that represents the legal fiction in question, WaMu, goes on to inform me that because of this “service” they feel completely justified in collecting thirty-four dollars for each ‘protection’ fee.
I look at it like this. I spend four dollars from an account with a balance of zero. This is possible because I have been given enough rope with which to hang myself. This situation arises because of what we call Credit Scores. With a higher credit score, we would not be placed in such a precarious position because we have proved with our credit scores that we will not be preyed upon thus also proving that it would be a waste of a con-artist’s time and resources to pursue us as an avenue for revenue. With this four dollar expenditure, Washington Mutual applies there humanitarian policy of saving us by incurring a thirty-four dollar ‘overdraft fee’. Nobody, and I mean nobody within a bank has been convinced that this is the exact same thing as credit, just with an ungodly and unethical interest rate applied to this credit that was extended to me.
Taking much of the above into account, I had felt that a confrontation of some sort was needed. I had some overdraft fees that came about as a result of an extraneous charge which was immediately corrected by the next day. Before the money was placed back into the account, a thirty-four dollar fee was applied. As a result, this kind of snowballed into several other charges incurring overdraft charges and the first time I tried to have this reversed, I failed. Because I had to come to the bank in person. I do happen to work graveyards and fall asleep right around eight in the morning and wake up around seven in the evening.
This story is getting way too long and bulky, I won’t blame anyone for a TL;DR.
Simpler language:
Go to bank; inform employee to STFU and listen; Give me back the following fees or there will be a situation; Be told by bank employee that their job was to serve the needs of the legal fiction which they served; Force employee to reassess situation by asking “How far are you willing to go in order to keep this money?” “Are you zealous enough to put your well-being at risk and the freedom of another human being at risk (me) in order to protect this “Moral high-ground” of which you keep telling me about?”;
Smack person around with all the rage I have available to me that was created by my inability to hold a legal fiction responsible for its actions.
I don’t know what was to happen, but I was not going to walk out of there with any form of compromise.
Anyway, I guess I will have to write more about the other topics later. This post has gone on long enough.