My bank is charging me $171.26 for a simple mistake I made in a drop-down box selecting which account to pay my bill from at an online credit card site. My only recompense in all this came when I went to talk to the branch manager about my situation and discovered that she too - the branch manager of a bank - has to sit through the elaborately annoying phone tree, and wait like a regular stupid customer for “the next available representative” meanwhile being continually reassured that “your call is important to us.”

I knew this bank sucked when I signed up for it, but seeing that the level of technology, intimacy and decision-making authority of a customer, me, and a full-on branch manager, her, is essentially the same in its most basic appearance kind of blew me away. You’d think if a bank were going to screw over their customers, that they would at least be good to their employees and give them a leg up to piss on everybody else with.