The penultimate tune on Bonnie Raitt’s Road Tested is a track titled My Opening Farewell. Ending a relationship with a financial institution is hardly fraught with the emotional angst of the end of a love relationship but severing the entanglements can often be as tough.
Well good old Citibank, you and I are through. Farewell after more than 24 years of a credit card relationship, five years of a mortgage relationship (love the resale of mortgages) and 20 years of a banking relationship started when you were a pioneer in online banking. You’ve told me one too many times to go to my nearest branch, which in case you didn’t understand the concept of online banking any longer, is more than 900 miles away. And when the latest episode of nonsense was the result of you old Citibank putting a block on a savings account indicating checks shouldn’t be written against it for reasons you’ve yet to explain, well like I said we are just through. Given you opened the account over the phone and it was impossible to write checks for an account for which I had no checks, does it make any sense to block transfer of funds from the account?
Oh yes but there’s still my favorite from 1998 when one of your representatives in all seriousness told me if I wanted a cashier’s check to make a down payment on a house at the time my best option was to fly to New York City and get the check. And to think I gave you another dozen years. Fool or forgiving, I’m not sure which one that makes me but enough is enough and I’ve reached my limit.
Transfers have been started, signature cards mailed and research on other options is in full swing. So Citibank, consider this my opening farewell and nice to have known you but I’m on to a world that understands what the online in online banking really means.
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