Bank of My Ass

This morning I went to the bank to take out some money for coffee and poundcake, and found that $2500 was missing from my checking account. This caused me to lay a dinosaur-sized egg in the vestibule of the ATM and embark upon a three hour odyssey of calling: my bank, my local HR people, and corporate HR.

The upshot was the check was returned for insufficient funds. The catch? The funds, they are quite sufficient. The company I work for is doing just fine, thanks and has been since, like, the Civil War.

Our HR people, who are excellent and deserve to have statues dedicated to them in the Farmer's Market over on Broadway, straightened the whole thing out and got me money and even managed to pretend that I did not have an obvious and tremendously professional panic attack in one of their offices.

And by the way, because I'm crazy, of course I briefly thought that my check had actually bounced. I could see the media blogs lighting up: "Man, did you hear about the New York Times? 150 years of stability and then Hubley joins up and they go right down the shitter. It's like she brought the Year 2000 with her. Jayson Blair was nothing compared to this."

But no, no. It was not my beloved employer. It was, rather, my bank, which has lovely customer service people but terrible systems. Another friend of mine just had $500 go missing, and last week, when I needed to replace my checks, I was told that they could not issue me temporary checks, because I opened my account in Boston. Nice "merger", you guys.