this.is.shinkaideI am bored. And so can you!

Two months ago I attempted to withdraw some money from a Banco de Oro ATM in Greenbelt 3. I inserted my card and waited for an on-screen prompt. Nothing happened. I tried to cancel the transaction. The machine wasn’t reponding. I checked the card slot to see if there was anything preventing my card from being ejected. There was nothing. All the machine was doing was playing a video of how Banco de Oro’s services would be great for you and how they would make your life much more convenient. Lovely.

There was no sign indicating the machine was out of order and that it should not be used. It was functioning just as you would otherwise expect it to.

So I just pissed off and called up the customer service hotline to see what could be done. I told them what happened, and they told me that the card would be retrieved and sent to the branch where the account it was linked to was in 3 to 5 banking days. Fair enough. They gave me my bank’s phone numbers.

After 3 days, I called up my bank. Not there. I went there after five days, to withdraw some money and check on the status of my card; still nothing. They advised me to call the hotline. I told them the hotline told me that the bank itself would be the end destination of the card. I decided to just wait a little more, left, and came back the next week… and the next… and the next. Long story short, after nearly a month (which I presume is what their definition of 3-5 banking days is), they still couldn’t get their act together and give me my card back, and just told me to file an affidavit of loss and pay the fee for a new card.

Now this is where I started to get really irritated. First off, it was their fault that I lost my card, and now they want me to pay for a new card. Anyone could assume this was because they couldn’t care less about being responsible for their malfunctioning machines. So I refused to pay for anything since none of what happened was my fault – that would tantamount to someone punching you in the face, him suing you for injuries to his fist, and then his having you pay for his medical treatment. Small claims, but in principle it’s robbery, plain and simple.

So after two months of being incredibly inconvenienced (I use the ATM card’s debit functionality often because I don’t like carrying a lot of cash with me), I decided to ask about the status of my card again. After explaining my situation for the upteenth time, the lady behind the counter (who was very nice) and I had a conversation, which went something like this:

Lady: “Sir, your card still hasn’t arrived yet. What you can do is file an affidavit of loss and we’ll replace your card. The fee is …”

Me: “I would have no problem at all paying for the new card if it were my fault that I lost it, like if I punched in the wrong pin three times or something. But it’s not my fault. It’s your (the Bank’s) fault.

Lady: “Sir you really have to pay the fee for the new card, that’s how it is…”

Me: “That’s like saying ‘we don’t care if our machines are malfunctioning; if you happen to use them unwittingly it’s your fault, so it’s not our responsibility’”.

Lady (taken aback): “Well, no… not really… uh, please wait for a while…”

She gets up and goes off to consult with one of her superiors, and comes back to me after a few minutes. She then hands me a form to fill out; she tells me that the bank would be waving the card replacement fee, and that my new card would be ready in 7 banking days.

That’s what I wanted to hear. I had been playing the waiting game with them long enough, I did everything they had told me to do (except pay for a new card), and I had just about had it.

This isn’t the first time Banco de Oro has figured in making my life seriously inconvenient; the last time when my card was overcharged, they must have really felt that I was near boiling point because of all the hoops they were making me jump through, so they just resolved the matter and reimbursed the extra charges on their own without my going through their processes, even after I told them to just “forget it, I don’t care anymore”!

Moral lesson of the story: People can only screw you over if you let them. (Unless of course, they have a gun jammed up your nostril, in which case, defiance could perhaps qualify as a bad idea. But then again, that’s just me).

Quite frankly, I feel that this happens more often to Filipinos because of our generally docile nature; when something bad happens to us personally, we just tend to sit there and take it.

Don’t.