Castle Magus

...at least for important things. I sent an email (or, rather, webform message via the website) this morning to Wells Fargo about an issue I need to have dealt with. The reply I got back was basically nonsensical and useless. So, I guess I'll have to call them on Tuesday (Monday is Labor Day) and talk to someone who is (hopefully) actually competent, and not just someone who is apparently reading an email message for keywords to mechanically respond with worthless crud. Sending the email was intended to prevent me from having to talk to someone on the phone, because I dearly hate talking to strangers on the phone, but I guess I'll just have to suck it up and talk to someone on the phone. *weary sigh*

(EDIT)

I sent an email to Wells Fargo about this, and here is the response I got.

"Thank you for contacting Wells Fargo. My name is <redacted>, and I am happy to assist you.

I have received your message regarding the email you received regarding the Arbitration Language change

Regretfully, there is not a way to opt out of the Arbitration agreement. The agreement has always existed, however, the language has been updated."

So, if this is to be believed (and I still need to look into it to make sure it is true), then Wells Fargo has had this crap in their TOS all along and I just didn't know about it until now. What a load of crap.

(/EDIT)

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At first it was Sony and EA, then it was Microsoft and now it's...

...

...wait, what the hell? My damn bank is doing it now too?! O_O

Yeah, I got one of those emails today as well.

And, unlike Daily Kos there, I couldn't give less of a crap about their copyright on their terms of service, therefore I shall quote away. Here is the thing, in its entirety (any bolding and emphasis and such is theirs):

( Behind cut because it's kind of big )

Here is another article on the subject.

So yeah, unless I'm misreading the above, it looks like Wells Fargo is going to be doing the same "we changed our TOS to say you can't sue us now, suck it" thing as well. So far, it seems to only be referring to my savings account. Well, the reason I set up the savings account back in August was to get around some unrelated bullshit fees they were implementing. At the time, I was seriously considering just dropping Wells Fargo altogether and taking my money somewhere else. Now that this crap has come up, that same consideration is coming into play again.

(If I get a C&D or something over this due to the copyright concerns, then yeah, I'll take this down, but until and unless that happens, it's here to stay. People need to be made more aware of this crap, since more and more companies seem to be starting to do it, and it needs to be stopped, sooner rather than later.)

It stopped snowing an hour or two before work ended, so that was no problem.

The bus being 10 minute early, just as before, was a problem, however. I thought that they'd straightened up their act, since for a while there, the bus had been coming relatively on time. But twice now in just the past week or so, the bus has been 10 minutes earlier than it was supposed to be (according to the Trip Planner), and had been coming 5 or more minutes earlier beyond that. I've sent in yet another complaint about it. There's not much else I can do, aside from rant about it here.

Also, on the student loans front, I think I was viciously attacked one final time from beyond the grave by AES. My sister (co-signer on my Wells Fargo consolidation loan) got a call from them today. She told me about it and I called them back at the number they'd given her. Why they hadn't tried to contact me first, rather than her is unknown to me (even though I asked the dude exactly that on the phone, and he just said that they were going to try me next but that I'd gotten to them first, which didn't actually answer my question, but whatever). Just before I called them, I opened my online account and took a look at it. Turns out my latest payment, due on Feb 27, was overdue, as it was never paid. Why that is, I have no idea, since I set it up to auto-draft way back in November, and until now that had been working fine. Guy on the phone had no idea why it stopped either, except for one thing: an overpayment that had been made to AES by Wells Fargo months ago had FINALLY been repaid to them on February 11, and was showing up as an additional payment on my account. Even though it should not have done so, this payment, for whatever reason, apparently caused my auto-draft setup to be canceled.

I'm being facetious when I say this is the fault of AES, of course, but... yeah. Given all of the other boondoggles to come out of AES, it morbidly amuses me to pretend that this was an intentional attack by them. At any rate, I'm glad to finally see the last of them. Assuming, that is, nothing gets screwed up with my Fed payments, though those seem to be fine now as well, as far as I can tell. There is, however, an overpayment from the Fed to AES which has been cleared from my AES account, but which has not yet shown up on my Fed account, so... I dunno. We'll see, I guess?

Aside from the fact that I don't really feel like dealing with this shit right now, being out sick from work turns out to have been something of a mixed blessing. By this I mean that I was at home in order to make some calls concerning American Education Services utterly dropping the ball yet again.

As you may recall, something or another got screwed up with my Consolidation Loan with Wells Fargo, and they paid at least $10,000 less than the amount needed to clean out my private loans with AES. At first, I wasn't sure if this was the fault of Wells Fargo or AES, but I'm more and more leaning toward it being a screw up on the part of AES. Well, I thought that I had finally gotten all of that fixed up. Meaning that I received an email from Wells Fargo saying that they had sent an additional payment to AES which should have more than covered the remaining amount in my four private loans with AES.

Well, guess what... AES still managed to make a mess of it. Instead of applying this amount ONLY to the four private loans, as was intended, they applied it to ALL of my loans, including the Federal Stafford loans, which were NOT meant to be included in that. Therefore, not only do I still have residual amounts in those damned private loans with AES, for which I am still being billed the full amount by them, meaning that I am still effectively on the hook for double the monthly payment for what is essentially the same loans, but now the amounts for my Stafford Loans are screwed up as well. This means that my still pending application with the Federal Direct Consolidation Loans people is in jeopardy of being improperly processed now as well, which is (or at least was and should have been) a different issue altogether.

I called AES a little bit ago. I was eventually told that my account would be handed over to their Financial Management department, and to call them back "next week sometime to see if it has been cleared up". I followed that call up with an email, basically restating what I had talked about on the phone.

I am quickly beginning to share owsf2000's hatred of student loan companies. So much incompetence. It boggles the mind.

(EDIT)

Since making this post, I've talked with both Wells Fargo and the Federal Direct Loan people.

As I expected would be the case before I even called them, there was nothing that could be done on Wells Fargo's end concerning the mix-up with AES, so that's pretty much that. But, AES suggested that I call Wells Fargo and make them aware of the situation, so that's what I did. Nothing gained, nothing lost.

For the Fed people, I think I actually made a bit of progress since last time. They had listed both Educaid/Wachovia and AES as my "previous lenders", so I had them to finally remove Educaid/Wachovia from that. The situation was that originally back in the days of 2004, my loans were obtained through Educaid. Then Wachovia bought out Educaid, apparently. And then, later, Wachovia handed all of my loans off to AES. So that's taken care of now, at least. I hope. I also made them aware that the potential for them to get the wrong numbers from AES was there. I was told basically that if this does happen, that if I receive the certification letter from them (the Fed people) and it is wrong, then I need to just cancel that loan application altogether and start the process all over again. *sigh* Well, that's better than nothing I suppose.

(/EDIT)