Idiot Bank!

Image: CC BY-SA 3.0 Nick Youngson / Alpha Stock Images

Spoiler alert: Rant coming up...

This is a regular nightmare every three years when the bank debit card has to be renewed.

My idiot bank must have tens of thousands of customers doing the same each month, so why do they still get it so wrong?

All my Google accounts (Pay, Play movies, Adwords, & cloud storage) have frozen because my idiot bank chose to tell Google Pay I was getting a new card ending -6542.

They didn't tell me they were sending a card!

They didn't tell me what the new card number was!

Most importantly, they told Google I had a new card BEFORE I registered it/used it!

Surprise, surprise.... card -6542 never arrived. (not that I was expecting it)

The week before last I ambled down to the local branch of my idiot bank to find out when my current card, due to expire Apr, would be replaced. They looked it up and told me the bank had sent a new card on 25th March I should have it by now, or in the next few days.

Why didn't my bank tell me they were sending a new card. THEY TOLD GOOGLE!

I few days ago I visited my local branch to tell them I still didn't have a new card. So they cancelled it and ordered a new one (which at the time of writing I have not seen).

Meanwhile, all my Google services are now locked because the card -6542 which was never registered (and never even existed as far as I am concerned), is being declined by the bank. Even the Google Pay customer service agent I was messaging with last night, could see my bank account had planty of funds (how? I'm not sure I'm happy with that.) but couldn't do anything about it. She said it was because I had said 'yes' to some Auto-Update option.

You just couldn't make this shit up.

Here's a suggestion for my idiot bank to try and wrap its one-cell brain around...

TELL your customer you are sending a new card... AND ask them if they want it by post or sent to the nearest branch. Then it won't go astray.