My ATM and I are close. I see him several times a week to deposit checks--not a bad thing when you've just flown the corporate coop for a life of writing and consulting. Checks equate to rent getting paid; it means my clients are solvent. Just three short years ago, when every company south of Market Street seemed to crash simultaneously and I was thrust into self employment, paid rent and solvent clients were not a given.
Back then, I didn't enjoy looking at my bank account statements. They were painfully anemic and peppered with fees--because I was overdrawn, because I was under the balance minimum, because I was poor. I thought it was ironic that the less money I had, the more my bank charged me. Still, I was too beaten down to consider fighting back; I considered these charges the price of my bank taking a chance on me. I felt grateful that they bothered to keep me as a customer, that I didn't have to do my banking at Western Union.
Since that financially heinous year, money hasn't been a problem. I'm far from rich, but I'm consistent. I know how much I've got; I tend to keep a minimum balance well over $1,000. I pay all of my regular bills online. And, when I quit my corporate job for a self-employed path, this time I made sure I had enough in the bank to support myself during the ramp-up months. In essence I've become the ideal bank customer--low-cost, low maintenance, unlimited earning potential.
The past few months have been "up"--I'm depositing more than I am spending. Normally that makes banks happy. But not if you are Bank of America, my bank, a Bay Area ubiquity that has been charging me a $5.50 "Service" fee for the past few months.
I called BofA to investigate.
"Have I gone under my limit?" I asked the customer service rep.
"No," he said.
"Have I written any bad checks?"
"No," he said.
"What, then, have I done wrong?"
"You're not using direct deposit."
He explained, now that I am no longer employed at a company and no longer receiving checks via direct deposit, I'm charged a fee to manually deposit checks.
"Lemme get this right," I said to the customer service rep, "I'm paying for the privilege of GIVING your bank more money."
"You're paying to deposit checks, ma'am."
"Gotcha. But I'm not depositing via a bank teller. I'm depositing checks via ATM. Don't I get credit for that?"
It's taken banks years to train people to rely on ATMs and the Internet for banking transactions. BofA enforces person-less service by charging for the "privilege" of standing in long lines for customer service. If I'm any indication, they've succeeded in their mission, and customers are relying on quicker, less costly and less error-prone service, via the Web and ATM transactions. The battle for automated service has been won, so now why are banks asking us for even more?
"Is it about the NUMBER of checks I'm depositing?" I asked, thinking of ways I could consolidate my transactions.
"No. It's just that you're not using direct deposit."
"But I've always manually deposited checks, even when I had a regular job, and was never charged," I said. I've deposited company re-imbursements, birthday checks from relatives. Why wasn't I charged then for the "work" involved in depositing these checks?
It occurred to me: My bank was applying the squeeze because I was self-employed. The "service" fee was 1099 penance, insurance I must pay for being what they perceive as an unstable customer. The first stage of banking's battle for full-scale automation had been won, now comes the occupational cleansing phase--alienation of the unwanted minorities, the 1099s. The fees were their way of roughing me up, of giving me a hard time for not being like them--corporate drones. It didn't matter if I made more than I did while employed at a corporation, in their eyes, according to their demographic profiling, I was still at-risk.
This list has been inspired by Jean, who thought to write to me while Waiting for Godot, or Dell Technical Support:
