Avatar's Blog

I bought a television a couple of months ago. It’s a nice big LCD deal that now hangs on the wall of our living room. When we were buying it, my husband and I considered buying the television outright or purchasing the set on credit through Circuit City and Chase Bank. My husband and I are both young and have no college debt, so we thought; “What the hey! Let’s build some credit and take out an eighteen month, no interest credit line with Chase.” We took the television home and waited for our first bill.

A month later, my husband and I moved apartments and called Chase, among other institutions, to have them change the address on our bill. This process took quite some time: it appears that you cannot change your address online, and my husband went through a number of cyclical telephone systems until he found a disgruntled operator who would change our address. After all, one would not want our television bill to go to the wrong house... what if we somehow missed a payment!

A few more weeks passed and we were expecting another bill. Days went by, and no bill arrived. Logging on to our online account, we figured out why: the operator at Chase had typed in a completely erroneous address. Names have been changed, but the principle remains: say our street name is Eastridge Way North., the address had been entered as Eridge Way. No “North” in sight. No wonder the bill had not arrived.

We paid our month’s bill online and got back on the telephone to correct the error. This time, however, getting hold of a human being was far more difficult than it had been previously. The toll-free number on previous billing statements took us through a cyclical nightmare where computer after computer assumed we wanted to make payments, buy products and complete a myriad of other tasks that had nothing to do with changing our address.

Our next tactic was to try and fool the computers. Every menu we got to, we hit zero in an attempt to reach an operator. The first few people we were routed to said that they couldn’t help us, but would forward our call to someone who could. Three out of four times, we were sent to either a  new useless system or the original automated system that chases its tail in order to have you give it money. No pun intended.

The fourth woman appeared to be in a non-English speaking country, although she said her name was Jessica. She couldn’t change our address and she definitely couldn’t let us speak with a supervisor. Apparently, she didn’t have one. Jessica being pretty much useless, we hung up and called the actual store from which we bought the television. My husband ended up shouting over the top of the sales rep who insisted that he put us through to Chase’s billing department (read: automated lemming). Polite reasoning turned to anger and finally to begging as we literally pled with two different sales people that we be put through to a phone number that didn’t start with 1800, 1877 or the like. We’ll pay for the call! Please let us speak to someone who can fix our address!

Exasperated, a Circuit City manager told us the only thing she could do was send us back to the automated system, but that “if you press three a bunch of times, the computer will think you’re a merchant and it’ll send you to a rep.” With those highly technical, customer-service oriented instructions, we waited for the computer’s friendly tones and began madly hitting “3” on our telephone’s keypad. The success of our venture now depended on dictating our address to another person whose English was limited and who misheard the address twice before getting it right. We made sure not to hurry through the address, and we even spelled it out. Time will tell whether the person actually managed to fix our problem. The amount of time spent on the phone attempting to sort out this seemingly simple problem? Three and a half hours. Three and a half hours of our lives that, television or no television, we'll never get back.

The question is, why is it so hard to change one’s address through Chase Bank? Also, why does the bank wait for five days after you pay a bill online before processing it? My opinion is that this bank makes it particularly hard to do everything in order to have people mess up. They can offer eighteen month interest-free credit lines on purchases as menial as TVs because confused customers can think they’re making payments on time when in fact their payments are being processed after the due date and late fees and interest can be added to their accounts. Making it impossible to change an address also means that bills may arrive late (ours eventually arrived a week late). Another cute trick is to bombard customers with offers when they call and making it seem as though customers have to listen to all the offers before they hang up, for fear of negating everything they accomplished during the call. 

We have made three payments on this television, but we’re thinking about paying the whole thing off next month and working on building credit elsewhere. It’s just too dangerous to deal with an organization whose primary goal is to have you trip up. Although we realize that banks have to make their money somehow, we are not going to be the victims of this type of scheme. The TV was worth every penny we were charged for it; the nightmare of trying to pay for it wouldn’t be worth all the TVs in the world.