Frank’s Sporadic Blog, With Fries

People, people, people.

Let me warn you all that I am angry.  No, angry doesn’t really describe my mood now — better to say I am full of wrath.  Yes.  That’s better.   It has an Old Testament fire-and-brimstone destruction-raining-down-from-leaden-skies sound to it.

The source of my raging fury, you ask?

Wells Fargo.

Yes, the Wells Fargo that pretends to be a banking business entity.   Because that’s what Wells Faro (spelled ‘Hells Togo’) does — they pretend.  They pretend to offer various loans and other financial services, but what they’re really doing is this, and it’s so important I’m going to give it it’s own paragraph, so read carefully –

Wells Fargo creates chaos under the guise of offering financial services, and they do this for the sheer sadistic pleasure of screwing with people.

I think that sums up the entire Wells Fargo business philosophy and operating model quite well.  It’s certainly more accurate than the hilariously misleading blather on their corporate webpage, which — well, just let me translate a few of their more amusing offerings.

(Wells Fargo) Our Product: Service     

Translation: We like pain.  Not just any pain — YOUR pain.

(Wells Fargo) Our Value-Added: Financial Advice       

Translation: Would you rather be kicked in the groin or the face?

(Wells Fargo) Our Competitive Advantage: Our People   

Translation: This is Todd.  He’s here to ruin your freakin’ life.   

I could go on, but when I do, the ulcers start to bleed again. 

To anyone considering entering into any kind of financial arrangement with Wells Fargo, let me offer you some very simple advice.

Don’t.

That’s it.  Don’t.  The contraction for do not. I don’t care what they promise or how wide they smile, you’d be better off pretending your toaster is a loan company that works only when you stuff it with cash and turn it on.  Sure, you’ll lose all the money you put in it, but at least it’ll be over and done quickly. With Wells Fargo, the agony is going to drag on and on for months, and they can’t even make toast.  Seriously, I don’t think you could put five Wells Fargo staffers in a room with a toaster and a loaf of bread and simple pictorial instructions and end up with anything but a five-alarm fire, numerous severe injuries, and at least half a dozen botched loan episodes.

In fact, if one were to line up a hundred Wells Fargo employees and ask them to throw themselves at the floor, I predict that 90 of them would try but miss.  They would instead dangle bobbing in mid-air, their levitation powered solely by the sheer magnitude of their innate and profound stupidity.

Of the remaining ten, 5 would adopt perplexed expressions and after struggling to form words they would ask for a definition of the term ‘floor.’  The other five would wander off towards the nearest shredder, where they would gleefully shred vital documents until some vague sense of hunger drove them toward the nearest drive-thru.

And God help them if the drive-thru is staffed by former Wells Fargo ‘professionals.’  Here’s how that conversation would proceed:

Drive-thru Customer:  I’d like a burger and a medium fry and a small Coke, please.

Former Wells-Fargo Staffer:  What?

Drive-Thru Customer:  I’d like a burger and a medium fry and a small Coke, please.

Former Wells-Fargo Staffer: Who’s there?    There are words coming out of this box!

Drive-Thru Customer: Um, hello?  I’m trying to place an order?

Former Wells Fargo Staffer: Okay, you want to order food, right?

Drive Thru Customer: Right.  A burger, fries, small Coke.

Former Wells Fargo Staffer:  What?

And on and on for the next half hour.  Or, in my case, five months.

My epic five-month ordeal, it seems, is rather typical of the hollow-eyed masses who have run afoul of this vast empire of incompetent goofs and lying, predatory snakes. 

February, 2009:  The wife and I decide to refinance the house.  Wells Fargo has been hounding us with phone calls, so we pop in the office one day and just see what it is they’re offering.

I’m going to change the names here because in this entire mess there is one innocent person.  So when I say the Loan Specialist is named Gunther, that’s a lie.  Just so you know.

Anyway, Gunther is excited about a new loan program that’s backed up by some Obama money and the FHA.  The upshot of all that is that we could get a new mortgage loan at a sweet 4%.  That’s a very very good rate, and the other terms were equally generous, so we decided to sign up.

We do.  We have to have appraisals, we have to have termite inspections, yada yada yada.  We agree to all that.

Time passes.  March. April.  May. 

We call.  The loan is being processed, be patient, lots of volume, quoth Gunther.   We’re getting a little nervous — this should have been a tip-off — because it’s been over a month and no appraisals have been done.

I speak with young Gunther.  He is forbidden to speak with the appraisers directly, lest some forbidden time-loop be established and the universe should be destroyed, but at last he is able to ascertain that the appraisers, which were given all our phone numbers and contact info by Wells Fargo, were apparently given the phone numbers to a fish-gutting factory in Nome, Alaska, who were understandably confused when confronted with the calls.

Gunther, and Gunther alone, was able to supply the appraisers with the correct 7 digit phone number (a feat which only the Corporate Executives at Wells Fargo have so far mastered) and the appraisals were finally completed.

We were assured things would move quickly after that.

If this was a visual medium, I’d insert certain images here.  The seasons would change.  Trees would grow from seedlings.  Babies would age and become wrinkled old men who worked for Wells Fargo in the Hair-Pulling and Mild Torture Departments.  You get the idea.

Anyway, summer came.  Then we settled down into a steady pattern of delaying and denial.  What is the status of the loan, I ask.

The processor has it, I was told.  Sometimes just for the sake of variety the underwriters had it.

Now, you might think one could simply pick up a phone or send out an email asking these elusive Processors and Underwriters about the status of the loan.  But that’s because you don’t, like I didn’t, understand that Processors and Underwriters are quasi-mythical beings that inhabit a strange quantum space that renders them forever in possession of your loan papers, but never able to process, underwrite, or even speak about them.

June.  July.

I decided that the Processors and the Underwriters were playing some odd game of Hide the Briefcase in the steamy, impenetrable jungles of Belize.  And since Gunther and his boss were never able to make contact with these mystical creatures, I see no reason to believe otherwise.

Finally, after nearly five months of waiting and waiting and then waiting followed by more waiting, I get word that the Processors and the Underwriters have completed their work, and that — and here’s the fun part — the package they’re now offering bears absolutely zero resemblance to the loan that was described to use when we entered the hilariously mis-named ’stage of final approval.’

What they did, boys and girls, was pass papers back and forth until the grace period expired on the first set of papers we signed.  This allowed them to jack up the interest rate, to reduce the amount loaned, to change each and every little thing their tiny lizard hearts desired.  Which left us with an ‘offer’ that was so patently ridiculous passing mollusks snickered in open derision.

I think the strategy was to drag this whole mess out and then tighten the screws. 

I fled instead.  After wasting five long months dealing with a bevy of primates who proved themselves over and over to be incapable of any action more complex than a spirited round of nose-picking, I have washed my hands of them.  Which, sadly, makes me appear pretty stupid as well, just for letting them string me along for five long months.

To Gunther, and you know who you are, you were the only one who made any effort to move this flaming wreck forward, and for that I’m grateful. 

But being the only thinking being in a room full of meal worms, the poor guy never had a chance.

I gave Wells Fargo a polite (written) heave ho and paid all the appraisal fees and thought I was done with them.

I went to a bank — a REAL bank, this time — and within a span of a couple of days I had been approved for a mortgage with terms far better than the mouth-breathers at Wells Fargo were offering.  Closing was just hours away.

But then Wells Fargo reared its ugly head yet again.

There is, you see, a thing called an FHA case number.  When we first applied, it was given to the Wells Fargo underwriter who then apparently went into the Federal witness Protection program for a nice long rest.  Along with their socks and their acne cream, they also took the only existing copy of the Wells Fargo document entitled ‘How To Release an FHA Case Number.’

Can you see where this is heading?  That’s right.  The new mortgage couldn’t close until someone from Wells Fargo could be troubled to release the FHA claim number which, by law, is an act they are required to do.

Now, I’m told that releasing the number involves pulling up a website and basically clicking a nice big button labeled ‘RELEASE FHA CASE NUMBER.’  That would be easy for you or I or most circus chimps.  But for the majority of the staff at Wells Fargo, such an act is tantamount re-writing The Special Theory of Relativity (with annotations) in iambic pentameter.

Over and over I begged for the number to be released.  Over and over I was assured it was being released, even as we spoke. 

And maybe they thought they had released it.  I can just picture them out there, their sloping Neanderthal foreheads furrowed in concentration, as they turned off lamps, turned off radios, jumped hooting around vacuum cleaners.  Did that work?  Did that work?  Why dis ting make dat noise?

I grew increasingly frantic.  I retained an attorney.  I contacted the Comptroller of Banks, the FHA itself, a number of consumer fraud advocacy agencies and even the State Department.  The response of the local Wells Fargo branch manager, when told I was leaving his office and going to meet with my attorney, was classic — a shrug and a ‘do what you have to do.’

If my fevered recollection is correct, it took us two weeks and a few days to get that single button clicked. 

In that time, Koko the signing gorilla learned two dozen new words.  But to be fair, Koko has mastered the toothbrush, and has a measurable IQ.

In the end, I finally found a human buried in the damp depths of Wells Fargo Corporate.  And I mean I found them, too.  I was told at the local branch that they could provide me with no contact numbers, no names, not even those of their immediate superiors.  So I became quickly expert at finding hidden Wells Fargo phone numbers on the Web, and very good at navigating their internal phone trees.  That’s how I finally located a harried-sounding but ultimately competent underwriter who was able to navigate her cursor over the RELEASE button and then issue a flawless left-click.  That single act of hand-eye coordination alone places her millions of years ahead of her colleagues on the primate evolutionary scale.  I hope she is paid accordingly.

My every dealing with every person at Wells Fargo was a harrowing, gut-wrenching exercise in futility.  If you’d like to simulate this experience for yourself, I urge you to travel to some dank former Soviet bloc country and have yourself imprisoned there.  Then pick the most brutal and mindless of the guards.

Now try to engage this sadistic fiend in a discussion of Elizabethan poetry.  In Latin. 

Even with the beatings, my friends, you’re still having more fun than we did.

So, to all the wonderful wonderful people at Wells Fargo, I wish you — well.  What I wish for you is rather involved, and it includes the following:

* Hot pokers

* Furious mutant badgers

* Various 19th century farm implements

* The real-life family that inspired the movie ‘The Hills Have Eyes’

* An eternity dealing with your own Customer Service staff.

Keep in mind this is November.  The local Wells Fargo office is closed; they removed their sign from the building and vanished in the dead of night, to whence I cannot say.  Still, I had to wait a few months to cool down before I could even write this without mild heart palpitations.

In fact, just bringing all this up again is — where are my nitro pills?  WHERE ARE MY NITRO PILLS?

Finis.