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Wells Fargo seems to have a requirement that, after every contact they have with you no matter how trivial, they phone up and grill you on how good their customer service was. And invariably they start off with something along the lines of, "What was it that led you to come to Wells Fargo for your financial needs?" And I invariably answer quite truthfully, "I didn't come; I was sold to you." There is, of course, the potential after this for me to praise their service and to protest that if I had had a choice in who held my mortgage, I certainly would have chosen them in retrospect, knowing now what I wouldn't have known then. Alas, I have never been able to do this. For those who have been following along, I recently set up an equity line of credit in the context of (but not, as it happened, used for) my house-painting project. The WF rep was quite enthusiastic about trying to get me to sign on for all sorts of intertwined financial services, which I kept steadfastly refusing. I had no choice about having the equity line account linked to my existing WF credit card, and I had no choice about having to set up a completely unneeded checking account and savings account (which will languish there forever with zero balances if I can help it). But I specifically recall refusing his offer to link that nexus of accounts into an automated payment scheme whereby my bills could be paid out of the equity line which could then be paid off from my checking account. I clearly recall this. I also clearly recall on several occasions verifying that the equity line could only be invoked by positive action on my part, coming in to the bank and signing papers to do so. (The rep's assurance that this was so was undermined by the fact that they then sent me a booklet of check-like-objects that would draw on the equity line. These have been locked away in the safe so that they don't go off accidentally and hurt someone.)

But so I was more than a little confused when I received my first monthly statement for the account and there was a charge against the account (and it had already accrued a couple dollars in interest). To make a long story short (which involves all sorts of details of when various statements were mailed out and when various payments were made and peculiarities about the amount involved which didn't match any specific amount connected to anything rational), Wells Fargo had automatically drawn money from my equity line to pay to my credit card.

It took me about an hour on the phone, on hold to at least three different levels of service representatives, before I got assurance that they had reversed that transfer, undone the interest charge, and verified that the account no longer included any instructions for automatic payment to anything. And, in fact, that the account now has a pop-up note explaining this event, in case something else came up later. For some reason, I will reserve my feeling of relief until I get independent confirmation that this has all, in fact, happened and that nothing new is going to come up. But at least nobody gave me any grief about believing that I really hadn't authorized this type of transaction. So in their behalf, I will affirm that Wells Fargo does eventually clean up their messes, after having the mess drawn to their attention and explained in sufficient technical detail. I'd just be a lot less unhappy with them it there weren't such regularly recurring messes to clean up.