<snicker>

we’re (finally) getting the mortgage on our house refinanced. i went to the bank today, to get a cashier’s check for the closing amount (which we are going to get mostly refunded, because there’s an escrow amount that gets transferred from the old lender to the new lender, or some gawdawful bullcrap like that… i’ve never understood how these things work), and the lady behind the teller’s window said that, because of the amount that we have in savings, she was going to check and see if it might be possible to waive the $8.00 fee that she was going to charge to write out the cashier’s check for me…

yeah, if i had nothing in savings, she would have charged me the $8.00 fee, but because of the fact that she was dealing with “someone who has money”, she was willing to waive the fee. this is EXACTLY the reason we are going to be banking with someone other than JPMorgan/Chase bank when this is all over, but that wasn’t the funny part.

the funny part was that, apparently, i hadn’t just gone into another branch of JPMorgan/Chase bank, i had gone into a branch of the Chase “Private Client” bank, so i got the opportunity to talk with the “Assistant Vice President Private Client Banker” (it says so on her business card) who fell all over herself and frothed at the mouth when i didn’t immediately say that i wasn’t interested. she assured me that it wouldn’t cost me anything extra if i were to switch to the “Private Client” bank, which would mean that i would, never again, have to “stand in the teller line and explain what i needed 5 million times”, because “private clients” have their own, personal banker, who comes to them when they need a cashier’s check, or to make a deposit, and there are so many “other benefits” to being a private client…

i don’t know why — i guess i was just trying to be polite and get out of there as quickly as possible — but i didn’t tell her how vehemently i HATE JPMorgan/Chase bank, which only made her desire to suck me in even more obvious. i walked out with a cashier’s check for the closing amount of our mortgage and a whole bunch of “private client” information in an envelope, and a spiral-bound notebook (with metal spiral binding — only the best for the “private clients”) and she even threw in a ball-point pen in a little box… and she told me that she would call me (although i didn’t give her my phone number) in a month or so to “remind” me, if i hadn’t made the switch by then.

you can rest assured, that if i ever get a phone call from her, i am going to tell her EXACTLY where she can shove it.