Fuck the banks and fuck Laurentian Bank in particular

The Chihuahua of Justice shits upon you Laurentian Bank!

I remember twenty years ago opening a chequing account at a local credit union in Portland and what great service I got. Not just from the individuals who worked there, who were excellent, but also from the generally reasonable policies of the institution.

Today it is just all about scraping the poor and middle class for everything they can while treating their customers like total shit the entire time.  Record-making profits year in and year out for the Canadian banks, but if you bounce a cheque you have to pay them $47.  FORTY-SEVEN DOLLARS!!! That's like someone's food for a week.  When you ask them about it, they go on and on about all the work they have to go through and how much it costs them to "process" the bounced cheque.  We all know it's horseshit.  The same "processing" time it takes them to put the actual money in your account when you deposit a cheque.  Meanwhile, they are scouring free interest off that deposit, while you don't see any of it.

I had to open a new account recently and it has been nothing but pain and bureaucracy every step of the way.  The stupidest policy after the stupidest policy and sheep-like employees who have no power to make any decisions.  Their excuse now is new federal security laws.  Just one more way that this bullshit war on terrorism screws the people over.  We didn't even want to open a new account, just simply take one person's name off and add mine instead.  But oh no supposedly that is no longer allowed.  It has to do with people hiding money or something.  Um, is the bank not capable of maintaining a record of all the names on an account?

Even more maddening is how Laurentian Bank has clearly recently hired some PR company to do a big rebranding.  So you get these fake friendly sentences in handwriting font scrawled all over their ATM machines.  With the account, I got this huge book with chapers (in the same font) entitled "Take hold", "Seize the day" and the best "operate freely".  Yeah, those are the things I am trying to do except for I have to spend a fucking day and a half of my life just to open an account with you.

All I wanted to do today (after the weeks it took us to even get this account opened), was to get internet access to my account.  For some reason, they are not capable of just giving it to you when you open your account.  You have to phone them (a teeny hell in and of itself since there is no option for internet access in their phone tree).  And guess what?  I got negged on my security question.  I found this out after waiting on hold for 10 minutes.  Somebody wrote my birthday down wrong and now I have to go back to the bank (with two pieces of ID) to fix that, then phone them again.

And guess what, their website is going to suck.  I've already had the pain of dealing with 2 different Canadian banks websites and they are embarassingly bad.  National Bank is clunky, looking like it was made in 1997, but it is more or less straightforward at least.  Desjardins, that acts like it is the pride and joy of Quebec, is just a joke, a total mess where it is impossible to do anything.

All the banks suck, that is for sure.  But so far Banque Laurentide has been the worst.  Don't go there.

So fucking outraged right now.  You fuckers in the boardroom owe the people of Canada some answers.