Two things are driving me mad: big bureaucrats who make stupid rules, and little
bureaucrats who refuse to break them.
I recently went through a bureaucratic nightmare trying to extract my savings from a frozen
overseas bank account. Finding a way to communicate with them was the first hurdle. They
refused to deal with me via their own “secure mail” system because it wasn’t secure enough
to discuss personal information. They couldn’t help me on the phone because I failed to
correctly guess the answers to the verification questions that were based on information
several years and even more countries out of date.
When I eventually managed to identify myself to their satisfaction, I was pushed around half
a dozen different operators, all of whom refused to tell me exactly why my account had been
frozen. Every conversation with each of these operators resulted in the same suggestion:
visit a branch in person. Not an easy solution, being that I lived in a different part of the
world.
At one point, a nice young operator who apparently didn’t know any better explained what I
needed to do: they gave me an email address with the confident assertion that “they’ll be
able to help you out.” This seemed positive, but the people responding from this email had a
very different view. They outright rejected the documents I’d been asked to provide as
sufficient for unfreezing my account.
Eventually, another operator took pity on me and showed me the kind of generic letter that
the bank might send to someone in my position, if a secure means of communication were
available to them. I could not be sent such a letter, of course, because the need to
communicate internationally had not been conceived of by the bank. The letter explained
that my account would remain frozen unless and until I provide a current visa for a country I
no longer live in, or attend a branch to close the account in person.
My (thankfully modest) savings are just stuck, caught in bureaucratic stasis, until I next find
myself in a ‘local’ branch on the other side of the planet.
This happened to me too!