My TARP Contribution

I was looking at my bank account online the other day and I noticed that one of my accounts was MISSING. Yes, missing, as in not there. It was a CD that was supposed to have matured the other day, so I wasn't too surprised to not see it, but I was a little concerned about where the bank had stashed my money - it wasn't in any other accounts. So I did what I do best - I called customer support. Mistake..

The guy who answered the phone was trying to be helpful, but failing:

Me: My account seems to have disappeared - it was there yesterday, it's gone today
Him: I only see your checking and savings acccount, what account is missing
Me: A CD - lots of money. Enough to pay for the Vegas boondoggle your execs are planning
Him: Do you know the account number?
Me: Yes, in fact, it's in my statement from last month, before you made it go away
Him: I don't see it, I'll have to research it. Are you sure you have the number right? Where did you open it?
Me: Yes, I'm sure, I just read it from the PDF of my statement, unless you guys screwed that up?
...

And so it continued. Lots of time on hold, etc. Eventually he came back and said the branch was looking into it and they would get back to me.

And so they did - about an hour later a guy from the branch called to explain to me that when they rolled the CD over to my savings account THEY (the local branch) had entered the information in correctly, but during the course of "hard-processing" (something like that - it sounded like "manual data entry" to me) someone had transposed a couple of digits.

Me: Holy Crap! So my money is in someone else's account?
Branch Guy: No, the account number entered was invalid, so the money was in limbo

This is wrong on so many levels.. Ok, first, what the hell is someone doing reentering (incorrectly, I might add) the account information? Wasn't this all handled electronically? Apparently not. Someone actually PRINTED the transfer request out and then gave it to someone else to type in?

And what's this limbo account crap? The money was transfered to an invalid account and your software didn't think that was wrong and didn't prevent it? Does that sound stupid? Does this sound like the right way to do business? Right, as you said, someone would have picked up in it eventually - it seems like AS THE ERROR IS HAPPENING would have been the time for that to take place, not "when I happened to notice it."

They promised I'd get my money back tomorrow, anyone want to bet whether they come through or not?