Our wonderful small local bank...

We’ve been banking at our small Park City bank since July 1985. Quite a long time, by American standards. In those days, the bank was called “Silver King Bank” after the glorious mining era that began placing our little western town on the map. 

After that, and through years of mergers and acquisitions its name successively changed to “Valley Bank”, “Bank One” and today “Chase”. Along the way, service has become far less personal with tellers changing continuously and online banking becoming the new way of transacting, we hardly ever go to our bank except when we need to access our safe deposit box. 

This precisely leads me to the core subject of this blog. A week ago today, we received a letter stating that the safe deposit box we had for 37 years was going to be closed for good. Irate, I tried to call my bank by using the local number, but after spending five minutes going through interminable menus I found myself somewhere at Chase, but definitely not at my local Park City branch and unable to speak to a human capable of helping me. 

That left me with no other choice, but jump in my car and drive to the branch. There, after waiting more time speaking successively with three people, I finally found one willing and able to look at the letter I had received. After trying to make sense of it, she still couldn’t understand why my safe was terminated. Since it was the weekend, she said she’d get the problem resolved the following Monday, which of course, she didn’t. 

On Tuesday I called the bank’s local number and when I heard the employee unmistakable Indian accent, I asked him if this was Park City and he said no, this is Mumbai, India, and I responded that, while I had nothing against India, I would have liked to get the Park City Chase branch on the line. He sounded sorry and he said “This is how our phone system works, when no one answers in Park City, we handle the call overflow” which, I found later wasn’t quite true. 

At my request, he then transferred me to the Park City branch, and since it’s chronically understaffed to save Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s CEO, some precious cash, a recording told me to try later... Eventually, during the course of the day I got a voice message on my phone telling me that the letter was just an error, and that I should call the branch back to get a confirmation. I did and after five long minutes of waiting was back… you guessed it, in India!