Trod Bogs Sadly – Oddstray's Blog

Having worked for the requisite period (30 years) in the UK, I (Simon) have paid enough money into the UK state pension system to have earned a full pension (which is not very much, by the way). Because I started taking this pension 2 years after I was entitled to it, I was offered an increase in the stipend or a lump sum.I chose the lump sum.

Cutting a long story short, these pension payments arrive at the Bank of America and get transferred to the San Diego County Credit Union (because SDCCU somehow can’t receive payments from overseas). This is fine, usually, as I can use the SDCCU online tools to transfer the money when it arrives, but today, the lump sum arrived and was too much in value for the online tools to work.

So, I sez to B ‘let’s just go to BofA, have them cut us a check (cheque) and drive over to SDCCU and deposit it.’

You would have thought it was just that easy, but no!

BofA wanted to charge us $10 for the check! You read that right, they wanted to charge us for accessing our own money. The teller sez, ‘you can always just have cash’. ‘OK’ sez I. So they counted out all these $100 bills using the fancy machine, and then B and I counted them by hand and put them in a couple of now fat envelopes. So then I thought ‘this is so bizarre’. In a connected world, we should just be able to click a thingy on a web site and transfer the money, but now here we are, like some old time western outlaws, counting money and driving across town with it.

Even more bizarre was arriving at SDCCU, they double-teamed when they manually counted the cash twice. It just felt like a scene from a very bad movie.