Juniorbird.com

There’s a Bank of America within walking distance; instead, I drive to Citibank. I hate Bank of America because they stole my money and were too incompetent to give me access to my bank account. Such thieves and incompetents should not be allowed to run a bank, but they are why Bank of America sucks.
I’m not good at holding a grudge, but a few companies have pissed me off enough that I would never buy from them again — Bank of America is one of these. Like most people my age, I signed on with BofA during college, because they were offering spiffy t-shirts and had ATMs everywhere. Unlike many people my age, I didn’t have a check-bouncing problem; I kept my account in the green for years and years. Meanwhile, of course, BofA was stealing from my friends by “processing transactions in the order that would allow them to charge the most fees possible”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_America#Excessive_Overdraft_Fees. They left the bank, but I was lured to stay by BofA’s ubiquitous ATMs and my lack of problems. That is, until one completely random day.
On that random day, I had run low on checks, so I called BofA to order more checks. I wanted a somewhat different address on the checks — I think I asked for a new phone number on them — and the phone rep set my checks up just so. I waited for my new checks, and waited some more. My last check went to rent one month, so I called up and was told my checks had shipped. Two weeks later, no checks, so I called and re-ordered, with rush delivery; the fee was debited to my account, but no delivery. Finally, with enough money in my account to pay rent but no checks with which to pay it, I bought a money order for rent and paid the fee to the post office. Then I went into a bank and tried to order checks there; I learned that BofA had a special, unique address field in its records to which it would mail checks only, and, in my record, that address was blank. Rather than generating an error, the checks were going out and being returned and I was not being informed. Another effort to get checks, another rent paid with money order, and I deposited my next paycheck at the CalFed across the street from my then employer.
I kept my BofA account open for a couple of months, since there was money in it, to make sure no checks out there would be returned unpaid; meanwhile, CalFed (since bought by Citibank) sent me new checks in a timely manner and I was soon paying my rent the normal way. Finally, I decided to close my BofA account. I switched all of my fees paid with my BofA debit card to other cards, waited a month to be sure, then closed my account.
But I’d made one mistake. I had one, forgotten online service that billed quarterly. Six weeks after I closed my account, they charged my BofA debit card, just $5.99. I got an overdraft fee, a closed account fee, then another overdraft fee since the bank took so long to inform me of the fee. The total charge was well over $30. I called BofA and, after pleading my case that they should simply have declined a charge on a closed account, finally talked one customer service rep into retracting all of the fees if I would just pay off the $5.99. Since there was no question I owed $5.99, I went to the bank to write them a (CalFed!) check. There, the teller told me to wait, please, then the manager came out and told me that I had to pay the whole sum, or the account would be sent to collections. I protested that the customer service rep had told me otherwise, but to no avail. This turned into a yelling match in the middle of the bank; I finally paid the check and left.
So that’s how Bank of America locked me out of my account through incompetence and then stole my money. I don’t even think I’d take a mortgage from them now. Bank of America sucks and I hate them and theyre incompetent thieves.

Right now the rain’s coming down, plinking against the exhaust vent of my gas heater. The temperature’s falling, air stinging our thin blood in the night. But the rain’s not snow; it leaves the streets damp and washes the smog out of the air but it doesn’t provide the soft, quieting, monochrome cushion of snow. I miss snow, I miss winter, I miss the flakes falling and bringing a heavy silence to the world, I miss the steam from my mouth as I exhale and I miss the sharp, dark nights that come in October and wrap around us in February.
And now I am jealous of my friends back East. They are near my home and they see the snow that I dream of even as the sound of planes on approach to LAX breaks through the wet noise of the rain. Their “pictures of the snow”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/harlykwin714/search/tags:snow/ break my heart with memories of the quiet mornings after a snowfall, when silence and a bright gray light greeted the morning, followed by deep hope for the magic words “snow day” on the morning radio.
It was 1983, about this time of the year, when I awoke to more than a “foot”:http://wintercenter.homestead.com/photo1983.html of “snow”:http://blogs.marylandweather.com/2005/01/february_arrive.html on the ground. Bitterly, I washed up and dressed for school, hoping that school would be cancelled and that I could play in the snow but preparing for another mundane day of class in a heavy, stone building with thick-framed windows that made the cold winter sky so far away. We had, unusually, the radio on through breakfast, listening for the school closing notice; the DJs cycled through the announcements of closed schools over and over again, each time making my stomach drop; I ate barely any cereal as I focused on the babble, waiting for my school name. Finally it came — I was free! Even before the normal morning post-breakfast fun of the Transformers could come on TV, I had my snow pants on and was choosing my mittens from the pile that sat in the closet by the door.
When I opened the door my cat lept out in front of me, as he did every day when I left for school, but soon he was surprised to find himself sinking into the snow up to his hips on every bound. Undaunted, he crossed between some bushes and disappeared into the yard next door. I made snowballs in the front yard, then helped my father shovel the walk. While my father tromped out, in heavy boots, walking to his work nearby, I piled the deep snow from the walk into feet-high walls that paralelled the narrow avenue I had cut from the door.
With the walk shoveled, I headed down the empty street to my friend Chris’s house. He was older — a third-grader! — and popular, and, when I got there, I learned he was industrious too. He’d piled the snow in his driveway high and dug tunnels under it, tunnels we crawled in and played in before walking to the bottom of the hill and building a snow fort. We waited in the fort, rolling piles of snowballs in preparation for battle, until we had to go back in for lunch. After lunch, there being no other children in the neighborhood with whom to do battle, we ran around the neighborhood and never returned to the fort. Through the whole day the bright gray sky sat in heavy silence above us, the street devoid of sound except for the crunch of our boots in the snow and our laughs as we ran up the hill and then down again.
Then the evening came, and the gray closed in, the quiet muffling even our calls to each other as we dodged between parked cars, playing our games. Soon we were called back in, our mittens soaked and icy and our noses red from the dry air, to be welcomed with dinners of hot soup and an evening in front of the TV, comfortable that no school would open with feet of snow on the ground, that the next day could include both Transformers and snow tunnels. Rain gives no such days, no such feels, as much as it cleans the air and moistens the plants on the ground. I miss snow days.