Empty Chair

Some of you may remember that just over two weeks ago, my Dad and I had an extremely unproductive visit to his bank to try to change his bank account.  Today, we went back for the third time to try to sort out changing a joint account into a sole account without having to go through the business of altering payments in and out.  I thought we had established at the end of the last meeting that we would be able to do this once the Power of Attorney had been accepted by the bank.  How wrong I was!

The woman who we had been seeing all along started off by mumbling to Dad about the phone call she had made to him yesterday.  He couldn't hear her.  I had to translate again.  Then she said that we were there to open a new account. I said that we weren't. She said that was all we could do and she had told me that from the very start, 6 weeks ago.  I told her she hadn't and that she had been so confused at our first meeting that she had to keep phoning people up and going for advice.  She told me that I must have misunderstood.  I told her not to patronise me.  This photo was taken just after she had walked off (I can't say "out" because she only merits a cubby hole on a landing) to get a manager...

Not a good experience.  The "manager" came and tried to pacify me with platitudes so I told her just what our experiences had been with this member of staff and that as Dad had had an account with the bank since 1939 I felt we were being treated very shoddily.

It makes my blood boil to think about it!  We were eventually directed to another member of staff who still tried to send us back to the original member of staff until I refused to have anything more to do with her.

Some of you may find this hard to believe, but I've never been that stroppy in a situation of this type before.  Maybe I've never had to.  We won't be staying with that bank for much longer.  Just long enough to make sure that all the payments we have got to alter are going to the right place so that the move to a different institution will be straightforward (!)

So this is the empty chair, of a member of staff who has fallen far short of the standards I expect of someone working in a customer serving role.  Shame.