Company Loyalty

We have a budding small business so we opened, quite appropriately, a small business account at the local branch of a huge multinational bank. The employee who opened the account for us explained that there would be a service charge which would be waived if, every month, we used the debit card that was attached to the account. We used it each month and avoided the charge until July when we forgot to use it, and got smacked with a $16.00 service charge. In August we made sure to use the debit card, and got a statement with a record of the debit card usage and, on the same page, another $16.00 service charge. I brought that to the attention of the bank teller, who called over one of the people who sit at desks in the lobby. She looked at the statement. "You see," she said, "the card must be used during the time period of the statement." "It was used on August 11th, " I replied, "and the statement is from July 31st to August 30th." "I already checked that" murmured the bank teller, but lobby-desk-woman waved her off furiously. She frantically began looking at the back of the statement. I would have been impressed, except that she was looking at the part of the statement where they show you how to balance your checkbook. "The bank made a mistake", I offered, "You need to refund the service charge". That did it. She glared at me as if I had insulted her beloved child. This woman must have earned her lobby desk through company loyalty. "You must speak to Robert", she proclaimed, "Robert will take care of you". Gosh, that sounded ominous. Heaven only knew how much company loyalty Robert would have.

You will no doubt be happy to know that Robert was as nice as pie, and just as efficient. He refunded the service charge and put in a claim to customer service to ensure that the problem would not recur. He had no trouble acknowledging that the huge multinational bank which employs him had made an error. I was glad to meet him. And I suppose it's also nice to know that there's still some company loyalty around in the world.