Hating is Good Clean Fun!

Twenty two billion. That’s 22, 000, 000, 000, 000. Change those numbers into dollars and that’s how much HSBC made last year. What do they spend the money on?

Do they build hospitals and schools so that the people who make them all that money can live better lives, become more productive and make them even more? Or do they pack in into briquettes and burn it in the furnaces that keep their shiny headquarters nice and warm? Who knows?

One thing they do not spend their money on is helping the customer and making sure that the customer feels that he is an essential partner in the enterprise.

You can always tell ‘disgruntled’; the irritation, the picky moaning tone, the whine in the self pitying tirade. It’s second rate anger and it lacks that touch of personal passion which characterises the justified fury of the wronged customer with a grievance.

When you have a telephone banking service you still have to pay in cheques to an actual bank: in my case, banking with First Direct, that is my local branch of HSBC. You would have thought that personally posting a cheque with paying in slip through the door of the bank would have ensured that the bank, though whose door the cheque was posted, would be in a pretty good position to pick the cheque out of their post box and process it.

Not so.

The cheque had inexplicably disappeared. What had happened to it? How could it have flown from the security protected post box into nothingness? A problem. The solution? Up to the customer.

You phone the organisation which issued the cheque; explain the circumstances; get the original cheque cancelled; ask them to raise a new cheque; check the telephone bank and the actual branch to see if the cheque has been found; transfer money from another account to replace lost money; wait; then take new cheque to bank; deposit money; wait the three to four working days for the instant electronic transaction to be made real.

Then you get home from paying into the bank the new cheque and find, waiting for you on the telephone machine, a message. The message is from the telephone banking service asking you to phone them as they have a message for you.

The message is that a cheque which has been credited to your account has been cancelled by the issuer. The red mist descends. You mind, fuelled by adrenaline, realises that the branch has found the cheque, credited the cheque and not bothered to inform you.

Now the real fun starts. You try and contact your branch. I did it, and it only took me 33 minutes. The number in the phone book for the Rumney branch of HSBC does not get you to the branch but to a call centre; asking for the branch manager from the call centre eventually gets you to someone you think is the branch manager but is actually a liaison officer; getting from the liaison officer to the branch when a phone apparently rings to indifferent ears is virtually impossible, but, as I said I did it.

My questions about the cheque fell on ignorant ears which knew nothing of the cheque. Presumably losing cheques for thousands of pounds is an everyday occurrence at the Rumney Branch of HSBC and finding them is all part of the ordinary round of incompetent banking. Who cares, it’s only a customer!

When did they find the cheque? When did they pay it in? Why did they tell me to cancel the cheque? Why didn’t they have the common courtesy to phone me to let me know that the ‘lost’ cheque had been miraculously found? Why list a number for a branch when it doesn’t relate to the number? What exactly do they do for their money?

God knows most people have a banking story to tell, and with the revelations of the (can one say illegal?) amounts of money that they charged for overdrafts and other ‘banking’ expenses all of us can be dissatisfied with the service that they chose to give us, but the wandering cheque has infuriated me out.

I await the letters of explanation for their actions with interest, a word which has clinking connotations for the bloated plutocrats who behave with a callous indifference to the plight of their customers that suggests that if someone like Ivan the Terrible applied for a job he would be rejected as being too customer friendly.

Having said all of that, I can’t really quarrel with the people in First Direct who generally have been very helpful, but they have to take their responsibility as it is easier for a person to be, well, personable, when they are at phones length from the human customers and when actual physical presence is only obtained when First Direct punters use the HSBC outlets.

The negativity of the afternoon has totally eclipsed the pleasure of the morning when Ceri phoned me to come to his aid as Gwen’s camera was broken. The paintings are building up with some extraordinary examples of his art including a painting of a low level landscape with only a church steeple rising from the level horizon with the majority of the picture space taken up by a depiction of clouds which would not have been out of place in a Dutch landscape of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.

Once again the few pen and wash studies that I saw show great facility and I’m sure would be great little sellers in an exhibition.

I will have to spend more time on my photography as that is the only way in which I am going to produce interesting images!

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