Dad misplaced his checkbook and my sister and I were unable to find it so we closed the acct and opened a new one (sigh). He had been someplace everyday for the past week including out of town for 2 days so it could have been almost anywhere
Found this week in a box of envelopes in his car!?
Changing his pension deposit took one phone call to a local office to a real person. His automated withdrawals were also easily switched.
Social Security has been an exercise in frustration. As this adventure started I developed the worst case of laryngitis I've ever had. Dad had trouble hearing the automated system so we had it on speaker phone and I'm trying to walk him through it, then it wasn't hearing him correctly and threw us out. My sister walked in with some things for dad so we recruited her to be our voice. The system could hear her correctly until it got to "say and spell your mother's maiden name" We said D----- it read back "B*****", no, D-----, "B*****",(repeat several more times), "I'm sorry I'm having so much trouble" and throws us out of the system again. We've tried multiple times more in the last ten days and it can't get the letter D in that particular spot. It catches the D at the start of our last name just fine so why it won't at that step is puzzling and wildly annoying. Coughing will throw you out of the system too. I've never wanted to reach through the phone and choke "someone" so much before. I even dropped the F bomb as I hung up in frustration the last few times.
in addition to all the bad words I was thinking while trying to do this and later said out loud once my voice started coming back.
You can somehow eventually get a real person between 7a - 7p M-F but I haven't made it out of work early enough to do this with dad yet. I have today off so I'll take him to the local Social Security office and sit in line to try to get a real face to face person to fix this.
What did the gov't paperwork reduction people estimate the above should have taken? 10 minutes. I'm closing in on 2 hours. Who knows how long we'll be stuck at the SS office today with it being the end of the month. If dad had let me set him up with the 7 digit computer password this would have been much less painful but just convincing him to do direct deposit was a victory.
Thank you for letting me vent so I can remain civil later.