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TL;DR: I worked at a bank call center, the bank was super shady, and I went on an overdraft fee refund spree my last week.
In college, I worked at a call center for one of the worst Bank of America (oops, meant banks in America 😉). That bank, which will remain unnamed, was doing all kinds of shady stuff (probably still is). For brevity, I'm going to focus only on one specific shady thing they did: processing payments out of order in order to maximize overdraft fees (OD fees from here on). Each OD fee was $34 ($51.50 adjusted for inflation).
There were guidelines for refunding OD fees, and they all had to be the bank's fault. That said, you weren't expected to give out many, if any, per month.
After about 7 or 8 months of dealing with customers that the bank was kicking while they were down, I couldn't take it anymore. I went in on a Monday just knowing it was my last week.
First call of the day was this lady who overdrafted her card 6 times at a fast food place. All of the offending transactions were all $1-4. I didn't really ask why (irrelevant), but looking at the transaction history, yep, they were processed out of order. She had a big payment go through later the same day which overdrew the account. Had the transactions been processed in order, only the big payment would have overdrawn (1 fee instead of 6).
However, according to policy, none of those were technically the bank's fault because in the super fine print somewhere it said that the bank processed transactions largest to smallest and it was her fault.
That's when "this is my last week" went from a "probably" to a "definitely".
I said I could only refund one as a courtesy (the bank did let us do that occasionally), but just made up something about her being my 1,000,000th caller and I was gonna refund all of them. And I did. She was fucking ecstatic.
From Monday to Thursday mid-morning (more on that below), every caller that wanted an OD fee waived got it. Some guy even called in with a question, didn't even mention the OD fee, and I was like "Oh, I see you have an overdraft fee last week. Lemme take care of that for you". Bam, refunded.
My goal was to Robin Hood until Friday and quit, but some lady's arrogance and entitlement on Thursday morning absolutely broke me. She had like $175K in checking and was complaining about three tiny, $3 yearly fees. I was all set to refund them (not that she needed them, but hey, I'm sticking it to the man here). The system wouldn't let me touch one of them since it was over 2 years old. So I let her know I knocked off 2 out of 3. That wasn't good enough, and she went on a tirade.
So I undid the refunds, apologized, and said I'd check with my manager. I put her on hold, left my badge on my desk, and just left.
I wonder if she's still holding trying to claw back that last $3.
That was a satisfying, then infuriating story. Thank you!
Ha, thanks. It's pretty much my only "sticking it to the man" story, so at least it's a good one.
The ending is a little less infuriating when you realize the old miser lady probably called back to get those account fees refunded (I reversed the refunds I did‡) and was told by someone else (who wanted to keep their job) that she was out of luck (those were legit fees). She most definitely would have said something like, "well, the other guy I talked to said he was going to refund two of them" (as if we don't hear that all the time) and then still being told no.
I'd like to think she reflected on that and realized that her entitlement caused her to get nothing, but people who complain like that usually don't do that kind of soul searching.
‡ Not really reversed, just didn't finalize the process after she went on her tirade.