Given that I’ve written over 1,200 posts for this blog I’m not too surprised when I stumble across something I’ve written and then totally forgotten.  A case in point is the post Bankers are Giving Lawyers a Run for Their Money that I wrote a little over a year ago.  In that post I take Chase to task for their behavior towards us regarding the last payment on our car loan.  Here’s an excerpt to give you a taste:

Here’s what has my dander up today: When we got back from San Francisco we had a message from Chase saying we’re late on our last car payment.  This confused Celeste because we’ve been paying with autodrafts from our bank account for four years,
or the entire lifespan of the car loan.  When she called Chase back
they said that if we’d read the fine print of our loan we would have
known that they don’t accept autodrafts for the last payment.  Okay,
fine.  So Celeste asks the very unfriendly bank rep why we’re hearing
about this only now that the payment is 90 days late and we’ve been put
in collections?  The rep’s reply is that she can only handle payment,
not answer customer service questions.

It gets better.  Celeste asks how much we owe.  The rep says she
needs our bank information before she can answer any questions.  Huh?
After Celeste asks again the woman gives her the amount and they take
care of the payment information, which by the way requires a $15
processing fee.  Huh?  (Celeste truly has a knack for getting the
asshole reps).

Before she gets off the phone with the bank’s collection-dolt
Celeste gets a customer service number, calls it and enters into
banker-logic zone. The customer service rep asks her for our address to
verify that he’s talking to the right person.  When she gives him the
address he says that it is the wrong address.  Bingo, they never got
our change of address when we moved two years ago, which probably
explains why we didn’t get a late notice on the final payment.  Yet
they were able to track us down for collection purposes.  Nice…

Here’s my problem.  The bank is probably within their rights,
technically, to treat us like this but in the real world they are
behaving reprehensibly.  We’d obviously been good customers for four
years, but they’re treating us like criminals because of an honest mix
up?  And who’s to say it’s our fault?  If they could track us down for
collection couldn’t they have done the same for a courtesy call
reminding us that an autodraft wouldn’t be accepted for our final
payment?

Less than a year later we see what’s happened to the banks and other financial institutions after the underestimated impact of the sub-prime meltdown.  The hubris endemic to the financial services industry has led to the inevitable "correction" but it’s near impossible to enjoy it because real people are losing their jobs while the jerks that engineered this fiasco are bailing out with platinum parachutes that make their predecessors’ golden parachutes look positively pedestrian in comparison.  Will someone please sue these turds and make an example of them?