Wells Fargo, Take... Four? Five? Ten?

How many hours have I spent on the phone with Wells Fargo over the last couple of years? After over a decade of incident-free banking, in which I have never had any problems that required more to resolve than a quick driver-by conflict resolution with the local teller, I moved away from my hometown bank and I opened a new set of accounts with Wells Fargo. They were conveniently located, they held my mortgage, and their hold music is no more crazifying than anyone else out there. And you know what? To their credit, they've always been really nice when I've called and asked them to fix their mistakes. But I have spent literally hours with them over the past couple of years getting them to correct their mistakes.

The joint account sweetie and I use to pay our household bills is the latest Wells Fargo timesuck. For a while we were getting a $1 fee every month as a fee to view electronic images of checks we wrote from the account. The problem? We never had checks printed on that account, we use it exclusively for free online billpay. Every month we'd be charged for an add-on feature that we never requested, never used, and in fact had absolutely no way of using. And every month I'd call, they'd reverse the charge, say they didn't know why that fee kept appearing, and reassure me it would never happen again.

Last week I called and went through the rigamarole again, and Steve, the guy who reversed the bogus charge, said that if we would just let him change the designation on our account from "Advantage" to "PMA Advantage" we could keep using our account just as we were now, only without any monthly mystery fees. Done and done. Today sweetie sent me an email asking if I knew why our account was overdrawn by about $4 when we normally leave a cushion of at least $20 in there. Instead of our old friend the $1 charge, we had a $25 fee for the privilege of having this new account designation.

Luckily Steve had given me his direct number, and I got him on the phone quickly. He reversed the charge and said "some linkages" had gotten messed up when they'd reprocessed the account designation, whatever that means, and that it wouldn't happen again. Awesome. I'll let you know in February whether that's true.