Tuesday April 13, 2004
By boat no less. A first for me. It is an inspired plan born of course, of necessity.
Here's the thing. I have a bunch of household effects in a storage facility in Cary, NC as well as a storage locker here in Kingston. I wasn't kidding about being the Storage Queen, you know. The Cary storage place needs a payment as soon as possible. I messed up by not checking my balance in my NC account earlier. I was certain there was enough to cover a month's rental. And now, I am behind. Not good - I really don't want my piano and a few other sentimental items to be taken hostage.
I have a cheque ready to go, but the deadline to prevent the next stage of delinquency procedures is April 25th. Today is the 13th and I know that it takes an average of 10 to 14 calendar days for a letter to get from here to there. I am certain I do not want to know exactly why that is, but it just is. I also know from experience that it takes the USPS less than half that time to get a letter from anywhere in the US to anywhere in the US (continental).
I checked out the Canada Post offerings but then remembered that I already tried their Express Post prepaid service last year with dismal results. For instance, you can only track it until it leaves Canada. Like that's information you can use. As I recall it took about 2 weeks anyway and cost me $8.00 instead of a buck something for the regular mail rate. (I was too busy to fight with the post office here regarding the "guaranteed delivery" feature.)
Living in Kingston, I can get myself over to Cape Vincent, NY by driving to the other end of Wolfe Island and taking a second ferry. The whole trip will take less than 2 hours and is free of ferry fares if I don't take my car into the US. No problem. Once I am there, I'll just deposit my envelope (with 0.37 cents US postage affixed) and come back. I love it when a plan comes together.
So, I'm going to America by boat this afternoon. (I'm not taking any pain remedies until I get back though - those border folks are tricky enough without complicating things - you know? Especially the Canadian guys and gals when Canadians are returning from the States. The stories I could tell will wait until another time.
I called the wonderfully pleasant folks at Wachovia Bank, NA (my bank in the US) to get the lowdown on the correct snail mail address for sending a cheque to myself as well. The guy who helped me was so nice that when I told him I didn't have any preprinted deposit slips, he ordered me some and said he'd make sure to check my account and reverse the charge since I am way up here in Canadia-land (a Stephie-ism :), the second a is long). I didn't even have to ask.
I wanted to cancel the online bill payment service since I hadn't used it for a while. No problem. He transferred me to the online service folks (who didn't even ask me all my account information again. Don't you hate it when they ask that over and over?) He'd already briefed the woman he sent me to so she just verified that she understood it correctly and then took care of it while I was on the phone with her. I love US banking.
Oh, and here's the BEST PART: I pay zero, nada, zilch for service charges on this account and get statements mailed to Canada monthly with images of the checks included. And the INCREDIBLE PART: for the paltry sum of $1.00 monthly, I get a Check Card that acts like a debit card, with a twist: to merchants it looks and acts just like a Visa credit card, using the widely available Visa network to do the debit magic when I make a purchase.
HONESTLY. No service charge per transaction plus I think it's more secure than a debit card because a signature is required. Which means a merchant's system cannot learn my pin, I don't think, since I never enter it. There is a charge if I use it at a Canadian bank machine to withdraw cash, but that's forgivable because it is a different financial institution. An easier way to do currency exchange I just cannot imagine.
Just one example of why I enjoy(ed) living and doing business in the States.
Wachovia is run by a great group of people. I was doing some M&A work with a company I worked for in the US, and while investigating a web services company, and got to speak with them fairly extensively. They outsource almost everything IT related, and understand that the savings on the bottom line can be used to make the customer experience better. I never dealt with them as a customer, but they sure impressed me from a business point of view.
One bank that you could never get me to go back to there (or here) is HSBC. I had established an account in late November in NYC, and had deposited my pay in Dec prior to going home for Christmas. I got home and went to withdraw Xmas shopping money and got the old insufficient funds. Long story short, they had deposited my pay but for some reason cancelled it, then re-deposited it.
Sounds harmless enough until you realise they put a 7-day hold on the funds when you deposit, and don't clear them. The account had a bunch of money in it, but depositing the pay put a hold on that amount. Cancelling it was equated as a withdrawl, and counted against the money that was already there, not the held funds. Re-depositing it added yet another hold to the running total, and my account was (in the HSBC computer's mind) overdrawn. Talking to them on the phone was so satisfying - "I can't do anything for you because the somputer won't let me, but the hold will come off in 6 days." Gee, thanks, conveniently after I get back to NYC and I need cash now.
The kicker, I got a $50NSF charge the next month. Never again.
Excellent way to get access to the US Post, btw. I'm also a huge fan of FedEx ground in the US - cheap, reliable, and trackable. I shall say nothing more about Canada Post, because really, what's the point? ;)