FOWC with Fandango — Contract
I spent a very large part of yesterday trying to get the mailing address for my mortgage company. Not the address for paying the bill, but where to send the tax paperwork so they could pay it out of my escrow account.
My bank wouldn’t give me the information. They said it was secret. Secret? It’s MY mortgage and I’m the one who pays the bill. But it was too secret to tell me, assuming they even had that address. So, I went to the website and there must have been thirty different addresses listed, one of which was for tax bills. Except the address was incorrect. They have changed the name of the group that pays tax bills but neglected to notify those of us who have tax bills to be paid of the changes. This is what happens when you switch to online bills. You don’t get any details at all.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t get into my account which turned out (eventually) to be (probably) my own fault because there was a number missing. Oops. Also, in the process of trying to argue with my bank into giving me the address for my mortgage company, I realized I couldn’t find my checkbook.
Not like I use checks very often these days, but I know I had one. I have a vague and distant memory of having removed it from my bag because my bag had gotten so heavy, I could barely pick it up and I thought “Why keep all this paperwork in here when I don’t use it anyway?”
Sadly, that’s the last memory I have of that stuff. I don’t know if I accidentally threw it away during one or another of our major cleanup efforts, or — worst of all — put it “someplace safe.”
“Someplace safe” means I will probably never see it again, or if I do, it will be years in the future and I won’t care anymore. I do have a couple of other checkbooks. Garry found them in the drawer under the printer and since our address hasn’t changed in 18 years, they are fine if we happen to need a check. But I’d really like to figure out where my checkbook and check entry pad went. I’m sure they are in this house. Somewhere.
I looked hopefully at Garry and he looked blankly back at me. He can barely find his own shit, much less mine. Ditto my son who thought my believing he might actually remember something was pretty funny. The dogs, who think it’s much too hot to go outside, were all asleep and for once, I could hardly blame them.
I’m still mad at the bank. How can they prevent me from knowing the address of the biggest bill I pay? Did I sign some kind of contract that says they can do whatever they want with this information?
In an earlier, more innocent time, we actually had to add the address for our payees. Now, the moment we enter the name of the company, the bank grabs it and says “Okay, thanks. Ready to go.”
This is supposed to protect me from hacking. I think it is possible that it is mainly protecting the information from me.
I am not going to be done in by the awful things happening in the world. I’m going to die of details. Of lost passwords. Of vanished items that are safely put away … somewhere. I will be crushed under the weight of miscellany.
A few minutes later he returns to speak his support for the Second Amendment and the president. “All this gun stuff . . . we’ve always had guns in school and…