Dear Bank of America,

Thank you for carefully training your customer service representatives to tell me how much you appreciate my business at the end of every call. Otherwise, I would never know.

In spite of your campaigns promoting paperless transactions and easy online access, you have completely denied online access to a portion of your profit base for the last three months. This does not inspire confidence as a customer or as a (former) potential investor.

Early in November, I lost online access to my accounts. Your web site’s first message read that this service was currently unavailable and instructed me to try again later. I did. Several times. On different machines with different browsers.

My first call about the problem took nearly an hour, where one of your employees walked me through the steps of clearing my cache and deleting my cookies, with many erroneous directions for the browser and operating system I use. Fortunately I am fairly well versed in those operations and could manage despite the misdirection.

That didn’t work. She referred me to technical support, who told me this was a known issue and assigned me a ticket number. They assured me that they were working on it and would contact me. They did indeed contact me, to tell me they were still working on it.

Over a month later, the problem still had not been resolved and I had received no further communication from your IT department. The message on your web site now told me there were no open accounts associated with this user ID. I called again. During this call, I was told you had migrated your payment service from myezpay, which I’d never heard of. I can only guess that you believed your own programmers could manage your database adequately and with less expense to you.

You were wrong.

The result was that customers with closed accounts could no longer access bill pay online.

I was assured the problem had been recently resolved, even told that representatives knew in advance certain customers might have issues, and that I should have access soon.

I also asked why I hadn’t received paper statements in the meantime and was initially told I had requested to stop paper statements. On further inquiry, your representative revealed that your new terms and conditions agreement, issued at the same time as the migration from myezpay, included an automatic opt in for paperless statements, which would have included a pop-up allowing me to opt out.

In case you are not aware, there is a tool called a pop-up blocker that many of us engage to avoid the barrage of advertisements that assault us when visiting a commercial site such as yours. Since I have neither the need nor the time to read terms and conditions to which I must submit regardless of whether I like them, I was entirely ignorant that I had “requested” to stop my paper statements at the very same time my online access was blocked.

I don’t believe I need to point out the genius of automatically opting in your customers for paperless statements at the same time you’re performing a service migration you know will create issues. It’s almost as if you want your customers to overlook their payments due so you can charge them late fees.

Another month later, on January 22, I called yet again to see if my account access could be restored. I was on hold for more than 70 minutes. When I reached a representative, he assured me he could find someone who could fix the account and put me on hold several times. When he reached a representative whom he said could help me, she told me she could not, as my accounts were “blocked” and not currently accessible through the web site, but that she could take my payment over the phone. I do not want to make my payment over the phone. But it seems that other than snail mail, I have no choice. She apologized and said you were working on it.

Are you?

I then contacted a representative through the chat function on the web site. After wasting her time for about 4 minutes (I must say, they are far better trained at sloughing people off than your phone reps) I was told I needed to call the customer service line and that someone there would most certainly be able to help me.

Right.

I told her to have a fabulous day. And I meant it, because, after all, it’s not her fault your database is broken. I can draw one of several possible conclusions from this:

1. Your database programmers are incompetent and do not know how to fix the problem.
2. You do not care and have not instructed your database programmers to fix the problem.
3. You are taking payoffs from the U.S. Postal Service to encourage people to use stamps again.

I understand that since my accounts are not active and that I will not be a new source of revolving debt for you, my concerns are less important to you than those of an active customer. Though you’ve seen fit to ignore my existence, I am certain you would take issue if I ignored the existence of my debt to you. I’m sure it’s not the largest owed to you, but your business relies on increments, and I can’t be your only customer with closed accounts still owing you money. Your own representative acknowledged this was not the first call she’d taken on this issue.

Of course, I am probably in the minority of those with closed accounts still paying. And I pay on time.

Maybe that’s the problem. Since I’m only paying down my debt instead of accruing more or racking up late payment fees, I’m not a valuable customer anymore. I am grateful that you at least send me cheerful emails three times a month telling me that my online statement is available, even though I have no access to it. I will continue to respond so that your customer service representatives have something to do.

You are a full-service bank offering everything from credit and checking to insurance and retirement services. Based on my recent experience, I do not see your institution as competent enough to be trusted with my money.

Though I have accrued more debt than I like to admit because of past circumstances, I’m now financially stable and can foresee a time in the near future when my revolving debt will disappear. Under certain circumstances, I may one day even use a credit card again.

When I do, it will not be a Bank of America card.

On Writing Poetry

Hi, my name is Amy, and I write love poems. And I’m about to stop apologizing for it.

I suffer from a malady born of the late 20^th-century notion that one’s avocation can become one’s vocation, having made the gross error of earning a higher degree for something I enjoyed. Don’t get me wrong: I loved every minute of it, had some very fine teachers, and developed an appreciation for Tanqueray that continues to this day.

But despite my mentors’ best efforts to stave off post-graduate writer’s block, the exercise was paralyzing. I have variously blamed my lack of self-discipline, my miserable first marriage, and my penchant for self-medicating. Certainly those were contributing factors. Only now, as I become reacquainted with my writing self, does a fourth factor occur to me: In my quest to become the right kind of poet, I have silenced myself entirely.

To study an art academically is to seek snobbery at its most codified level, not that there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, the most entertaining denizens of the contemporary university are the post-structuralists, or whatever they’re calling themselves these days, trying madly to adhere to a wholesale rejection of societal values and meanings, looking down their noses at anyone who would naively attach an aesthetic judgment to a poem or painting.

But among those who do still believe meaning is possible, it’s no longer enough for art to say something; it must say something worthwhile. Now that no one reads poets anymore, it’s paramount that what we write have import and weight, qualities my work evidently did not possess. On my thesis table of contents, next to several titles, one committee member merely wrote, “slight.”

Nothing could have possibly been more damning. Where academic poets (largely) seek to paint themselves in sharp relief against slam poets, whose topics are so highly personal and so highly political, and who, still more unforgivably, actually have an audience, it’s crucial to demonstrate how very seriously one takes poetry.

I’m afraid this expectation has just wrung ­­the life out of my work, or at least snuffed out my interest, in spite of my own soapbox moments on the topic. It forces the writer to be an immediate audience to her own drafts, to judge the worth of what she is trying to say before having said it.

In case you’re wondering, I am by no means retracting any previous proclamations suggesting that poems actually be well crafted. But I am done with second-guessing the value of my own muse. So what if she’s more Shirelles than Shakespeare? There are things to be taken more seriously than poetry, and we would do well to remember it. After all, writing poetry is a lot like playing the guitar. No matter how earnestly they pursue their art, no matter how lofty their ideals, most poets took it up just to get laid. (Even Shakespeare, you ask? Especially Shakespeare.)

So what if I end up no more than a third-rate lyricist, a trailer-park Edna St. Vincent Millay trotting out my past loves for display in iambic pentameter, or four-part harmony, even? There are worse things I could do.

Hold on to your hats, folks. There’s poetry ahead.

Of Ukuleles and Airstreams: Ramblings

I don't think of my family as odd. But every now and then I make mention of some detail at work and get a look like they think I am making it up. Yes, I really do have a first cousin (once removed) who leads a senior citizen ukulele band. I had the pleasure of seeing the YesterUkes recently at an Airstream rally near Table Rock.

Their ages span several decades, and their repertoire a century or two, at least. This was the second of their gigs I've attended, and they have definitely taken it up a notch, with one member providing sound effects to accompany "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?" and another performing an impressive falsetto rendition of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight."

When I hear some of their stories, I'm inclined to disbelief myself, like the one about the octogenarian whose wife finally made him give up his airplane for a motorcycle. Or was it the other way around?

They are definitely a fun and unusual bunch, and well worth a watch. If you visit their blog (there's even an imbedded video or two), you can see their schedule, which runs out to late 2010. Who knew there was such a demand for ukulele groups? And did I mention they occasionally feature kazoos?

But what I came here to talk about was Airstreams. The YesterUkes played against a backdrop of Airstreams of every size and variety, and it reawakened my hankering for a silver bubble of my own again. I won't be in the market anytime soon, but my husband says I can have one, as long as he gets to plant a hedge maze in the back yard. I think that's a fair deal.

As for my weird family, unfortunately, I don't even think we make the top ten. My cousin the ukulelist (is that a word?) put it in perspective: Her husband has a cousin who refurbishes computers for Tibetan nuns.

Top that.