Don't blame me. I bank locally.

[Librarian]

OK, so we've all seen the bumper stickers that the self-satisfied holier-than-thou types have on their Priuses. Yet what does it really mean? Read on....

Three and a half years ago we moved here to the Happy Valley, behind the Tofu Curtain, and rented an over-priced run down shack. Started an account with the local credit union since both of our employers required direct deposit of payroll. All was fine and dandy.

Six months later we buy a house. Our first. One of our considerations was that we wanted a good interest rate, low points, good terms overall, the usual crap, so we ended up with a mortgage through the very same credit union where we were doing our banking. Of couse there were strings, like we had to live in the house that they were lending all this money on, and they required automatic payments from our direct-deposit checking account. But all that was fine because where else was the money going to come from, and why the hell else would we be buying a house? So we close escrow, move in, and start making payments.

Fast forward to three months ago. We get a letter from the credit union that they have sold the servicing of the loan, not the loan itself mind you ("your money is working hard right here in the Happy Valley") they have only sold the servicing, i.e. who does the arm breaking when you are late on a payment. Now we have to deal with some company in the mid-west that is, oddly enough, called MidWest.

I ignore the letter of course. Hey, it's my right as an Amurrikan to ignore official business letters if I want to. And eventually (the beginning of this month as a matter of fact) I notice that my account in the online credit union thing no longer has the mortgage payment set up. So I fiddle around and find that they have transferred the mortgage to another line and I set up automatic payments to that line and go back to sleep.

Last week I get a letter from MidWest, with the credit union logo on the pages inside, that tells me all sorts of things that I don't need to know, like that I can set up automatic payments online. But one of the things that bothers me is that the address of the property that I am supposedly paying this mortgage on is listed as the shack that we rented when we first moved here, not the house we bought three years ago.

Now it is obvious that MidWest isn't digging up all this on their own, but is only repeating the stuff that the credit union has told it. So I go down to the credit union and ask the receptionist (who looks and acts like a junkyard dog, not like someone you would want to bank with) for "the person in charge of the MidWest loan servicing fiasco". The first thing I am told is "MidWest has a toll-free number that you can call if you want." I somewhat politely tell her that I want to speak to someone here in the credit union which is why I'm standing here in the credit union.

Eventually, I get to talk to some smarmy guy, and I tell him that my idealism about banking locally and keeping my money here in the Happy Valley goes out the window when I have to call someone in the midwest to talk about my supposedly local loan. He reassures me that I can always deal locally which is when I tell him that the first thing the bulldog said was that I should phone MidWest.

So, with the initial pleasantries over with I tell him why I am there, namely the fact that MidWest thinks I'm paying for a shack in another town. He tells me he has no idea how that could possibly have happened, but he reassures me that he will take care of it. We go on our way with only a small threat to take our business elsewhere.

Twenty minutes later my cell phone bleats its usual annoying tones and who is it? The smarmy guy from the credit union. He can't find my address. Let me repeat that.... he can't find my address. The address that we owe a quarter of a million dollars on, that he holds the trust deed on, that we have lived in for three years, that they generated four thousand pages of loan paperword for. He can't find it and wants me to tell it to him over the phone.

Don't blame me, I bank locally.

But maybe not for long.