Today’s installment of Washington Mutual banking was not unlike living inside the movie Brazil, although I should reiterate that the problem isn’t with my branch, where the rep I’ve been working with on this has been on the same page as me since the beginning.
This morning, I bought in Card Services’ denial of my dispute, and the rep at my branch proceeded into yet another maze of phone hell, trying to find an actual human being. When she finally got through, she handed the phone over to me.
After making sure Card Services had the proper records before them, they then informed me that Merchant Errors was handling this — despite the fact that it was Card Services which mailed me the notices saying that my dispute was being denied and to call Card Services if there were any questions.
The person at Card Services proceeded to explain that he was going to “bring in” someone from Merchant Errors, a phrase which I assumed meant he was going to conference them in and we’d all work it out together.
Silly me.
Instead, all he did was hand me off to a person at Merchant Errors, providing me with no instructions what to do once that’s who I was talking to, and providing the person at Merchant Services nothing but the case numbers. So, the woman in Merchant errors proceeded to act as if I was intruding upon her day because I had no idea what was going on.
It then turned out that the woman in Merchant Errors only had in front of her the electronic form filed by the rep at my branch on December 16, and none of the supporting documentation to back my dispute, all of which had been faxed on the same day.
Three times I asked the woman at Merchant Errors where all of that supporting information should be faxed to, so we could send it again. It took three times because for the first two times she decided that what I was doing was asking her to tell me why she didn’t have that information and where it had gone to — when in reality I simply wanted a proper fax number so we could re-send it.
She gave me a fax number. And that telephone call mercifully ended.
The rep at my branch took all of the supporting information we had already faxed on December 16, plus the new details on Card Services’ denial of my dispute, and goes off to fax them again.
She comes back a rather long time later with the following news: The number given to me by the oh-so-unhelpful and victimized-for-being-asked-to-do-her-job woman at Merchant Errors wasn’t, in fact, a fax number.
On the upside, it was the number to an actual human being in some department that seemed to the rep at my branch to be a good place to be able to find an actual human being. On the downside, she got that person’s voicemail.
And so I go back to waiting.
The rep at my branch asked, as I was leaving, if there was anything specific I wanted to make sure was communicated. I offered two very particular points.
One, the operative date for this dispute isn’t the date of payments, but the date on which the services for which those payments were made were not provided to me. Two, there are people out there in the same boat, but using banks other than Washington Mutual, who have their money back already.
My branch is an oasis of intelligence within an apparent morass of bureaucratic run-around characterizing every other element of Washington Mutual with which we’ve had to interact. I’m not holding my breath for the rest of WaMu to catch up.