Once I noticed my credit card had charged me a $39 late payment charge. My checkbook confirmed I had written a check and it had cleared, but a day after my payment due date, even though I had mailed it seven days before it was due to a Richmond address just two zip codes away.
This wasn't the first time the post office had failed me. Once, a freelance check took 16 days to travel across town. I checked the postmark. Another check took 33 days to travel from Los Alamos, New Mexico to me in Virginia. Pricewaterhouse Cooper once took a survey and rated my postal district "the worst place in the continental United States for mail service."
So I called my credit card, Capital One, which is in my town, and explained to the customer service rep that I felt I had done my part. I had mailed my payment at least five days in advance, as directed on the bill, and it wasn't my fault the post office took from Monday to the following Saturday to carry my payment across town.
She said it didn't matter what the postmark on my envelope was, or when I mailed the check. All that mattered was what day it got there, and it got there late, and not one day, but two days after it was due. I had no answer for that, and she wasn't cutting me any slack, so I hung up. But when I looked at my statement again, she was wrong about one thing. I had missed the due date by one day, not two.
This was still not a winning argument by her standards-late is late-but for some reason I decided to call back anyway and tell her she had that part wrong. I knew I wouldn't get the same woman, so it's a mystery why I called. I was just mad. I got a man this time, and before I could even go through the whole saga again, he offered to remove the late fee.
Well, how nice! Apparently the rule about late fees only apply to people who don't call repeatedly until they get a cooperative rep...or a man. I have theories about what kind of customer service reps are more likely to cut you some slack, but we won't go into that.
Back in the early 1990s, I used to work in the customer service department of Signet Bank, and it was within our power to overturn bounced check charges if we felt the customer had a justifiable complaint. Some reps, like me, felt most excuses were just that, excuses. I only overturned the charges for elderly women on fixed incomes who had gotten confused. Other representatives were more liberal. They believed in keeping the customers happy. They didn't want to argue. They wanted everyone to literally have a nice day. So they removed all bounced check charges all the time, for any reason. All you had to do was call and they made them go away.
So these customers got used to having their overdraft charges erased like magic, and didn't worry about bouncing more checks. There was no penalty. That is until they got a rep like me on the phone who wouldn't budge, especially when their history of massive check bouncing came up on my screen. Then they were furious. I frequently didn't have a nice day at that job. The angry customers only had to go one step over my head to a supervisor, who would then overturn the charges for them. One frequent bouncer finally managed to even get me fired for not overturning her charges. I never understood why the supervisors backed her after all our training about using the power to overturn charges sparingly. And it wasn't a nice firing either. It was one of those deals that while you're in the office being fired, a flunkie is packing up your desk in a cardboard box and then two big men escort you out of the building and hand you your box and tell you never to show up again.
Why did we even bother to charge for bounced checks then? The only ones paying the fees were people too timid to complain. The meek may inherit the earth, but until then, they're paying all the late charges.
So the lesson here, which I was reminded of when my late fee was miraculously erased, is to just keep calling until you get what you want, especially if right is on your side. Thank the rep, hang up, and call again. And again. And again. Even if you're in the wrong, you can be righteously indignant and eventually you'll get a customer service rep who will fix you up because they don't want to talk to problem customers or get fired, or it's their passive aggressive way of getting back at their company, or whatever. Of course it's not fair, but as Jimmy Carter once said, life is not fair.
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