My wife says that anytime a company sends you a letter that starts with the phrase “In order to serve you better”, you can be certain that something is about to get much worse for you.
Case in point: recently my bank notified me that, in order to serve me better, their ATM machines would become “deposit-friendly”. I cringed. For years, I have been endorsing checks, filling out a deposit slip, putting it all in an envelope, and dropping it off in the night depository. I could do this entirely at my leisure, any time, any day. No more. The night depository has been removed. You have to go to the ATM machine, and you can’t just insert your envelope anymore, either. You have to stick the checks in one at a time (and hope it’s not a windy day – There goes your deposit across the parking lot!), and you don’t use a deposit slip. Instead the ATM machine slowly reads and processes each check while the traffic backs up behind you. Then you get a receipt that shows where the machine misread the amount on one of the checks, so now you get to spend the next business day trying to get hold of someone to find the check and properly credit your account. Needless to say, I only availed myself of this “deposit-friendliness” once. Now I’m back to having to get to the bank during their regular branch hours every time I want to make a deposit.
