Google may be God, but the Almighty's clearly headed for hell given He deposits my salary with Citibank each month - could it be perdition for my sins or do we actually trust in Citibank's ability to bank? It must be one of our April Fool's Day gags. After all, Citibank, the bane of all brands, is notoriously known (thanks, in part, to my ranting) for their general ineptness, as proven by their taking a month to complete a 24-hour transfer of money, and, to summarize, are about as effective as a paralyzed rabbi at a Nazi marriage. With the rabbi winning the effectiveness contest. By a long shot.
The simplest place to begin this rant is by pointing out that Citibank, with remarkable astuteness, seems to realize every person on the planet with half a brain is banking with ANYone else, and, therefore, they don't need a big support team for their pitifully small user base. Having exhausted their quota of brilliance for this lifetime, Citibank then proceeded to set up one, let me repeat that, ONE office across nearly 17K km with a population of 3 MILLION. And this is a calculated estimation from a business that handles your loan estimates and interest rates. I'm just saying.
Anyway, given Google decided to be evil in this one respect just to counteract all their employee friendliness, there I am, stuck with a Citibank account (having, by the way, signed for their reading pleasure 58,000 times to set up the account because though I was RIGHT there signing up, they wanted to make sure I was me; and though I had JUST signed two times in a row, they thought a different person had signed the second time, so could I repeat for their entertainment?) Hand broken, brain boggled, and overall befuddled, I figured my troubles were behind me and I'd just use their debit card and withdraw money at periodic intervals since my money IS all there and I DO need SOME of it every so often.
Unfortunately, like the villainous allegory for Life in one of those artsy movies noone ever watches, Citibank doesn't believe in happy endings. Rather, they DO believe I need their holy permission to access my OWN money with my OWN card and so they decide with no preamble whatsoever to stop my card from working. I've seen pregnant women in labour that make more sense than Citibank on their best day. Now let me clarify at this point that my debit card works on every other ATM in town. It's just Citibank ATM's that decide to act pricier than Rakhi Sawant with a new nose job. So I figure I'll go for relationship-counseling with Citibank some other time 'cos hey, atleast I have my money in SOMEway, right, why dispute and divorce.
But. And I admit sloth kicked in having worked 14 hour days for the last month or so - there's a Citibank ATM at office that I thought I may want to use rather than prowling the 17K km of Hyderabad in the dead of night hunting down another ATM having finally finishied working for the day. Let me clarify this isn't a particularly unreasonable demand - I wanted to use MY Citibank card on MY Citibank account on a CITIBANK ATM to withdraw MY money that was WITH Citibank. So, I trot on over to aforementioned singular office to see if they'll see my point, a process that involves waiting in line for an hour, signing various forms again (Citibank should probably quit banking and start selling counterfeit signatures instead), talking to sundry wondrously pleasant people who were clearly not getting enough sleep or food or wanted to use the loo or SOMEthing. To cut a story short to what I thought was a happy ending I managed to communicate that I would like a new debit card please, thank you and goodbye; the happy part being, I don't need to talk to you any more.
Or so I thought. Dum-dum-dum. Three weeks later. Since of course the debit card was promised in two days. THREE WEEKS later. I receive a pin for the card in my mail. Where's the card you ask? Well, it's not in thiiiis pocket. And it's not in thiiiis pocket. Sorry, I stooped to Citibank's level of intellect for a minute there. Anyway. Onward. I do not have the card, I have never seen the card, the card, for all practical purposes, does not exist. So, having spent enough time with Citibank to prefer visiting the mortuary, I called their support instead, and having pressed 1-1-1-1 several times (Citibank likes the numer one clearly) I finally got to talk to a human being rather than Shakira on a vibrator repeating insanely 'Please press 1.'I then asked if they knew where the card was because I didn't although I DID have the pin. They said to backtrack and asked what my birthday was, how old I was, where I lived, who I was. We then indulged in a brief tussle as they asked when I withdrew cash last and I told them I knew the amount but couldn't confirm it because I didn't print receipt slips because their insane little receipts have killed trees and I disapprove of such heinousness.
Just in case you thought this was all established over a pleasant tete-a-tete with one Citibank rep, let me inform you this information was painfully extracted and communicated over 25 phone calls (10 of which ended with Shakira saying 'Please hold' and then running away) and with 5 employees. Having concluded the pleasantries, we sat down to business, and I asked again, if they'd seen my card. They said they'd check if it was delivered. I assured them it had most definitely not been. They asked again for my date of birth - I think it's the phone equivalent of asking for your signature - and I advised them to change their career. After twenty minutes of assuring them I was not kidding and that I didn't magically want two debit cards just for kicks, I understood we weren't getting anywhere, and, having advised them to kindly change Citibank's profession as well, hung up.
I then went to withdraw money and found that in the enigmatic mind that is Citibank, "You didn't send me a new debit card" = "Please cancel my old debit card." And, unfortunately, for once, I actually NEED the money, it isn't just spilling out of my pockets and my bag and my wallet as always. So I called back my new favorite speed dial number and asked if it was okay if I took out my own money and if so how they proposed I should manage this since they seemed to have shut down all my resources to do so. In all seriousness, I asked if I should perhaps write a cheque to myself, travel 12km in the middle of a workday, and get it encashed, since this seemed like the most efficient fix given the situation. And of course it was simplest to withdraw all the millions in my account and carry it in my jeans pocket as compared to leaving it to the mercy of this brand of irrational lunacy.
Surprisingly, the answer to this reasonably worded request was, again, that they'd check if it had been delivered. I assured them I would physically deliver serious injury to each of their heads and was transfered to their 'senior' official which means I suppose that she has a louder voice than the previous employee. Having negotiated with her in a manner the Godfather would have been proud of, I got her to concede she'd make a new debit card for me in a day or two and that I could pick it up from their office since of course I'm not waiting another three weeks to find out they can't do this either. Moral of the story being: Thank God there's only ONE Citibank branch in 17K km for 3M people. There's a chance they may be able to get this right. Then again. Maybe not. But that's a story for another post.
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