Seriously, don’t even read this, I’m just being pissy because I’m in a M O O D.
Part The First
I will despise Wells Fargo until the heat death of the universe. I don’t bank with them, but they’re who Tim and I could get a mortgage with when we were buying this place. When Tim died, I wanted to use his life insurance to pay off the mortgage. But somehow in the seven years since we’d signed the paperwork, my name had come off it. Clerical error? Tim refinanced and didn’t tell me? Tim refinanced and told me and I 100% forgot about it? Doesn’t matter, it’s in the past. Anyway, they wouldn’t let me just pay it off because I wasn’t “approved” so either I had to refinance and buy it from Tim (who was dead at the time so I don’t know how that was going to work) or I could continue to make the payments “for” Tim (since he couldn’t sign a check, what with being dead at the time). Didn’t matter that I had POA while he was sick; now he was dead so POA wasn’t a thing any more. I could jump through some hoops to become… I forget what they called it… an “interested party” or something. Like if Tim ever decided to sell, they’d call me first? Fortunately I was on the deed to the property, and was designated sole owner of the property when I filed his Death Certificate with the State. Which, yes, I dragged my feet on doing, because paperwork. They finally agreed that I could pay it off, on behalf of Tim, since I jumped through more hoops to prove to them that I was the owner on the deed.
Then they overcharged me and have been trying to send me a $1400 check. In Tim’s name. As of… I don’t know, Wednesday or Thursday (this week has been a blur) I have 30 days to either deposit the check, or get it recut in my name, or they’ll send it to … I forget what it’s called. The Dead Money Office, or whatever, where then you have to go through Federal Government hoops to get the money. I’ve dealt with that before, or dealt learning how to do it, because somewhere my father has a check for $15 that someone lets me know about every few years, and I’m like, yes, yes, but it will cost me more than $15 to get that $15 so please leave me alone about it. Not gonna lie, though, I could really use $1400 right now.
Here, I’ll just repost what I wrote on Facebook the other day after a phone call with them.
Her: Wells Fargo, how are you doing today?
Me: Well I was doing better until I had to navigate the insanely unuseful Ai button pressing bonanza that people probably give up on before they even get to someone who can help them. How are you?
Her: Oh, I’m sorry about that. I’m fine, thanks for asking. What can I help you with today?
Me: Yes, I’m calling about an uncashed check, that I can not cash, because as I have repeatedly told Wells Fargo, multiple times, over the last four years, MY HUSBAND IS DEAD. So sending me a refund check in his name does me no good. He can not cash this check. Because he is DEAD.
Her: OK, well, first you need to fax something to–
Me: I’m gonna stop you right there. Do you have instructions on how to build a time machine so I can go back twenty years ago to when faxes were relevant?
Her: You don’t have a fax machine?
Me: I’m not a cave man. I don’t have a fax machine. No one I know has a fax machine. I doubt most of the people in the town I live in even know what a fax machine is.
Her: OK, well, where is your cities Wells Fargo office?
Me: There isn’t one. The closest one is about an hour away.
Her: Well, isn’t there an Office Depot or an Office Max near you?
Me: No.
Her: …. are you sure?
Me: Quite. I live in a small rural town. Any Office Max or Office Depot is going to be an hour away.
Her: There aren’t any businesses near you that can send a fax?
Me: Can Family Dollar send faxes? Or that honor system bakery setup by the post office that keeps getting robbed? How about the guy who sells honey out of the back of his truck? Do you think he might have a fax machine?
Her: OK, well, what you’re going to need to do is find one, and —
Me: Hold up a second. Is this an insurmountable hoop that Wells Fargo wants me to fail at jumping through so that they can keep my money?
Her: Oh, no, this is for everybody.
Me: So they want to keep everyone’s money?
Her: …..
Me: …..
Her: So the fax number is [insert fax number]
Me: That’s not the fax number that’s on this letter. Sure glad I didn’t use the number they gave me, even if I was able to travel back in time and find a fax machine.
Her: Now, on every page of the letter you’re going to need to —
Me: Let me ask you something. In the last four years I have sent multiple hard copies and multiple emails with copies of his death certificate. You can’t use any of those copies? I have to fax you a new, different copy? None of those ones that I have repeatedly sent in during the last four years are good enough to use?
Her: Let me see if I can find one *puts me on hold for a minute*
Her: It doesn’t look like there’s one attached to his account. So what you’ll need to do is —
Me: What did they do? Ball up and throw away every copy I’ve ever sent them? What is this even?
Her: Well, there may be one on the Life Events department, but I’m on the Check Release Request department. And you’ll need to contact the Escrow Department for —
Me: Jesus Fucking Christ. *hangs up phone*
My Facebook post was filled with a lot of good ideas about how to e-fax, so I am going to do that, but I definitely had to step away for a couple of days first, and calm down. I plan on figuring out how to do this on Monday, and starting Tuesday morning I’m going to fax it not just to the number she gave me on the phone, but any Wells Fargo number I can find, and I will continue to fax it every seventeen minutes until I hear they’ve recut the check in my name.
Part The Second
Remember when the TV in my living room just … turned itself off a few months ago, and wouldn’t turn itself back on? So I bought a new cheap TV for the living room. Well, the TV in my studio died…. I don’t even remember how long ago. A couple of years. I’ve been using my tablet in the studio as a TV, but the screen is awful and dark and the sound quality is terrible. I pretty much have to keep it a few inches away from me to see and hear anything. So, hey, though! I’ve got this 28″ monitor that I’m not using for anything (like any good hoarder, I never throw anything away unless it is well and truly broken in a way I can’t fix). So I thought, I also have this old Fire Stick I’m not using, since the TV in the living room died and I bought a Fire TV instead of a regular TV and plugging my Fire Stick into it. I can plug that into the HDMI port on the monitor, and, instant TV!
Except the monitor doesn’t have any sound (maybe that’s why it wasn’t being used?). So I bought some cheap speakers for it. Too cheap, apparently, because the volume will only go up so high (like, to maybe 5 on a 1-10 scale). So I did some research and bought some better (although still inexpensive) speakers. But I didn’t do ENOUGH research I guess because I get them and they will only plug into either a USB-C or USB-A. The wire from the speakers is USB-C, but it comes with a C-to-A dude. Guess what kind of ports the monitor has? If you guessed NOT USB, you’d be right! It has two HDMI ports and two… I don’t even know what the fuck. DAP? DP? Some bullshit designed just to mess with me, apparently.
OK, fine. So I ordered a USB-C female/HDMI male adapter dude. I did bitch about it on Mastodon/Bluesky, wondering out loud, like, at what point do I give up and just straight up by a TV? But a TV is like $100 and an adapter is like $12 and oh my fucking god I just want to be able to have Law & Order playing in the background while I do some work, why does this have to be so fucking difficult?!
So the adapter dude came in the mail yesterday, and guess what? No, guess. Did you guess that the Fire Stick that sticks into one of the two HDMI ports is juuuuuuuuuust wide enough that nothing can fit into the second HDMI port which is RIGHT next to the first one?! Did you? Did you guess that? Because that’s what happened. I swear to you I just wanted to chuck the whole mess into the borrow pit just north of me. It’s full of old cars now, nobody would notice a monitor with a tangle of speakers and shit.
After I calmed down a little, I was like… didn’t at one point I have some sort of connector that was basically HDMI to HDMI but it just made everything a little longer? Maybe it had a smaller plug, less wide than the Fire Stick, and it would work? It took about an hour digging around in things (yet another reminder that I need to go through all those Doom Boxes and sort shit) but I found it. And guess what? No, guess! Did you guess that it was still just a hair too wide, and that while I could get one in, and one tiny corner of the second HDMI stick in, I couldn’t get them both in fully.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH sob
Today I bought another cheap TV, it’ll be here tomorrow.
I had a good three more things I was going to add to this list, because this week has just been an utter shit-show…. but I’m already at 1800 words and honestly I’d be surprised if anyone was still in it this long. And there are still a lot of things I could say about all of this, too; about how Wells Fargo seems to make it as difficult to get money from them (or stop giving money to them) as they do on purpose. How many people, like me, or people who don’t have cars and can’t drive to a WF office to fight it out in person, how many people just give up? And technology… I already feel in a couple of places that tech is outpacing my ability to understand it. Me, a girl who’s been on computers since I was… Ten? Eleven? (That’d be 1980 ish). Stuff is just happening so fast in tech that I already feel like a luddite. What is it like for people my age and older who know even less than I do about tech shit?
And also, it’s a huge reminder that…. I’m it. I’m a widow. I’m not single on purpose. I used to have someone on my side, someone who could pick up the slack or research things that I was getting frustrated at or could call people I didn’t want to call, and now… it’s just me. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why it’s so much more insanely tiring to be a widow than it is to just be single, and believe me, I’ll have a long blog post when I get ready to write about that. For now, it’s just another punch in the gut that ain’t nobody gonna fix this shit for me, but me. Even on the really hard things when I’d just like someone to rub my feet and get me a whiskey and maybe even tell me I’m pretty.
