Writing about banks and naming names, bitch

Fortis is still a thorn in our sides. Looks like the beginning of the problem was one lone idiot there and then a crappy system around her that's proved itself incapable of dealing with the consequences of her idiocy. Oh well. Maybe someday Fortis will stop fucking up and I'll be so happy I could cry. See? I'm accentuating the positive and it's not even here yet! And then at the end of our contract, I'll rush to another provider so fast my head will spin. I lay into Belgians, I know, but besides some minor trouble last December (which they compensated me for) I've had no problems with ING -I've even been very happy with what I've got, considering I pay basically no fees. And while my colleagues, who almost to a man do business at KBC, are annoyed by the high fees and crap service, they've had no remarkable problems there. Fortis seems to be an especially incompetent institution (and an expensive one too - their rates are high). If you're ever in the position where you must live and bank in Belgium, I strongly advise against Fortis, and in the same vein reccommend ING.

But then the problem with Belgian banks is that they're very branch-based. I have a feeling all banks everywhere used to be like that, like when my grandfather was in the biz in northern England - he retired about 40 years ago. Back in the day when you talked to your neighbours and the bank manager could make decisions instead of a centralized computer saying yes or no, that made really good sense, I think. The bank was some sort of part of the community and has some familiarity with it. I'm making it sound very idyllic - I'm sure it was frustrating as hell at the time, but back in the day branches being the base of the system made sense.

Today it makes no sense. When your eligibility for a mortgage is calculated using defined evaluation tools, when people are tearing all over a city getting money from dozens of different machines, when everybody has a telephone and half the people have a computer in their home to allow them to reach some sort of centralized authority, and most importantly, when you've stripped bank managers of their non-petty power and when the branch is no longer part of the community - just another office people commute to - it makes no sense at all to force customers to have a 'home' branch. All that results in is situations like ours, wherein we had the bad fortune to use the Rue de l'Hotel des Monnaies branch of Fortis and be served by a bloody idiot who continues to fuck things up named Sonia Declerck, simply because our landlord took us there to create our deposit account. And now we have to clean up the problem with the same incompetents who caused it. Who knows? If we used another Fortis branch, things could have been different. We'll never know, because we'll never use Fortis again in any circumstances.

And with ING, I remember I had a problem with my card whilst Christmas shopping last year and popped into the branch at the top of Avenue Louise (Saint Gilles-Porte Louise branch) where the teller refused to help me in the flattest, rudest terms I've ever heard from a white collar worker in the private sector. Luckily I was just a 15 minute walk from my home branch, Bruxelles-Jardin du Roi) where they are all beautifully polite and helpful. But it did make me wonder if I'd be all 'yay, ING!' if I had to deal with the bitch at Saint Gilles-Porte Louise on any sort of regular basis. San Francisca, who also banks at ING, I think out of loyalty to her Dutch husband, used to bank at another Avenue Louise branch. She found it so dreadful that she switched to mine. She is from the States and does have rather slavish notions about customer service, but she's very happy now.

Up at the Vilification

That shit with Fortis is now ongoing as well. Doing anything in this retarded dump of a country is like herding incontinent cats. We'll never do business with those fucknards again and will definitely switch our house insurance to ING next year, as we've already switched our current accounts, also because of sheer blue incompetence at Fortis . . . The F-word is fed up. I am triple dutch fed up, because as the household 'francophone' I get the fun job of having to talk to these damnable bungling cretins, to try to help them sort out their own fucking mistakes. Plus he gets to soothe his flustered soul with two months of vacation, and me . . . but these sorts of comparisons are not healthy for the life of a couple. When we go to Australia he'll have to be the daddy because I won't have a clue what the fuck I'm doing and then I'll be glad of having once been useful. In the meantime we have an in-bank appointment today and I'm already concerned I'm going to get so pissed off I cry.

Moving on. I've decided the driving school is a scam. Since I won't need to purchase car insurance here in Belgium - thank heavens for small mercies! - and since San Francisca has offered to teach me on and let me use her automatic at the exam, and since I already know how to drive automatic from the Liviu lessons in Canada, and since I'm pretty sure I can teach myself the theory here with a book and some concentration, and since the nearby schools, contrary to the one downtown an acquaintance employed by the EU used do not help with the requisite paperwork at the Belgian equivalent of the DMV, fuck that. It would have come to about €1200 if I used one of the nearby schools. I can spend that money relaxing in Australia, learning how to drive stickshift on my own time. Kiss my ass, Belgium. I don't want to give you a cent more of my money. What a pointless mess this shithole nation is. But I will go to school if I keep failing the exams, which luckily have no effort-limit - à la carte and as cheaply as possible.

Not much else fit for print today . . . read another Somerset Maugham book, Up at the Villa. A bit of fluff compared to The Painted Veil, Of Human Bondage, and The Moon and Sixpence. Not that there's anything wrong with that - it was refreshing. And it gave evidence that Maugham, for all his difficulties constructing an elegant sentence, at least had the gumption at some point in his life to have a frank talk with a female human about her sexuality - something E.M. Forster, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, and George Orwell, three 20th century authors I generally like better than Somerset Maugham, all apparently failed to do. Anyways, it was fluffy enough that I wouldn't mind watching the movie. And I'd like to see Sean Penn not suck. I don't know why. I guess it's because he's still managed to hang on to a career as a serious quality actor and yet I just find him so fucking annoying to look at in every movie I've ever seen him in.

Tired of playing the game as they fuck up again and again

My new fucking anthem, at least for today, at least until I manage a good night's sleep:



Not much news today. It will be the first day I get an editorial published through work. With my real name and my photograph and everything. Obviously it will revolutionize the industry and I will be in international demand, especially in warmer sunnier countries. Vanity google searches will become just that little bit more rewarding. And probably I will sleep through the whole thing, or at least want to.

Elsewhere - remember the Belgacom fiasco? I was reminded of it incidentally yesterday whilst making an effort to resolve a new fucking fiasco, this time with our former bank Fortis, another near-bankrupt Belgian corporate monster of incompetence. They sent our unpaid house insurance bill to a collections agency, which I found mortifying, by the way - I worked for a collections agency for a week once before getting a real job, and I hate collections agencies, and I had always resolved to not have much to do with them. And to be fair, the bill was unpaid, because they hadn't been sending us any bills, at least at this address - the address that

1) I live at
2) The F-word lives at
3) The insurance coverage is for
4) Our statements and promotional material came to.

No. Instead they'd been sending the bills to a defunct address (the shitty school we'd stayed at when we arrived). For the last four months. Willful fucking stupidity. Fucking pig ignorance. It's not even a scam, because the collection agency is only charging us an extra 10 euros or something - they're not making money off it - and in fact, Fortis is probably losing money off it because of selling the debt to the collections agency. A collections agency who obviously took one fucking look at the addresses involved and could somehow figure out that they could probably reach us for our house insurance bill at our house where we live and receive our correspondence.

And the cherry in the virgin is that just a month ago, the F-word had been to Fortis and inquired into the terms of our house insurance, and the very helpful cretin he spoke to took the time to print out our contract for him and explain some of the finer points. Without noticing, or at least saying, that we owed the bank over 200 euros and they'd been trying to get payment since April on that contract.

I was talking about this last night with San Francisca and her Dutchman who were all a-twitter with excitement and I was all a-twitter with excitement for them, actually, as he's just found a massively excellent job in Amsterdam and they are going to move there soon, fulfilling one her dreams. That means when the F-word and I buy our bit of rainforest we can house swap anytime they want some sort of Crocodile Dundee experience and anytime we want a bit of Olde Worlde Culture and legal marijuana.

I haven't met a nationality that wasn't happy to mock the intelligence of Belgians, but I've never met people who do it with more dedication and detail than the Dutch. The Dutchman was in full fucking flight last night - I'd set him off by innocently asking why he'd been concerned that Dutch employers might not place any value on his Belgian work experience. Apparently the idea, for the Dutch, isn't that Belgians are stupid in the flat sense of the word, but that they're utterly incapable of communicating with each other or other people once they're part of any sort of organizational structure, and utterly incapable of seeing any sort of broad, abstract purpose to that organizational structure in terms of what customers were using it for or in terms of money generally. It's a broad and uncharitable conclusion but I haven't yet found any evidence to contradict it.

Anyways, if anybody who is obliged to move to Belgium for work stumbles across this: quick word of advice, don't use Fortis; it's been a never-ending comedy of errors with them. ING has been great, and has the lowest fees as well, as in none, which may be unique here - I'm not sure.