The Rowe Family Blog

I received a response from Metlife Bank via email. They didn’t offer any solutions except to call a bank advisor. In my previous post I mentioned that I tried to call a bank advisor yesterday and couldn’t find my way through their maze of phone menus. I wrote back to metlife bank today telling them how much difficulty I had finding the magic combination of digits required to speak to a human. They promptly wrote back and told me the secret. The secret is to press 2, then press 3. Now the real trick is to not enter in a SSN or PIN. Oh, and I think it might help if I have a chicken available for sacrifice.

My first impressions of metlifebank.com are not good. To start it wasn’t very clear to me how long my funds would not be available. After opening the account and doing an electronic transfer for the initial deposit I was surprised to see my “avilable funds” at 0$. When I inquired I was informed that funds transferred electronically are held for 45 days “for security reasons.” This apparently is only true for the initial deposit. While I’m not opposed to this practice I would have appreciated more notice about this prior to the transaction.

When the account was opened I setup two accounts for electronic transfer (two checking accounts in our name at other banks). Today I received a letter informing me that they could not grant access to one of the accounts because we “do not own the account.” That’s certainly an error on their part. We do indeed own the account and it is a jointly owned account. I suspect that they were confused because the address (that was crossed off) on the voided check was not our current address. We’ve changed addresses frequently and I do not wish to waste money on new printed checks when an address label affixed to the check serves the same purpose and costs far less than new checks. I hope that they correct this error quickly and easily.

I am pleased with their responsiveness over email. I received a reply in less than 1 days time for my first inquiry. Their phone support is a joke though. You really can’t expect to talk to human with this bank. There really is something to be said for small town banks.

Fox gourmet keeps spamming me. I’m not sure how they got my address (they have my real address).
They claim:

“This promotional mailing is CAN-SPAM compliant and was sent to you because our records indicate that you have subscribed to a mailing list on one of our sites.”
I sincerely doubt that since I never use my real address on any website. Also the fact that they call out that they are justified in spamming makes me detest them just as much, if not more, than the advertisements for more sleazy items. By alledging that they are CAN_SPAM compliant just tells me that they know what they are doing is dubious ethically.

We’ve regularly received hits from people searching about “John Holtz” and a few other items. Because of this I would like to recount a couple of stories that were present in our previous blog that I didn’t bother to transfer over to the new one.

The first story I’d like to recall is that of John Holtz Honda. Our experiences with John Holtz Honda of Rochester are poor. In the fall of 2002 Mary and I went to John Holtz Honda and test drove a 4 door Civic. Mary liked the car, and I liked the results of the research I did on the car. They offered us a good price and Mary wanted to buy from them because the salesman spent a fair amount of time with us. I agreed and on a Wednesday evening I phoned the salesman to put down a deposit over the phone. He took my credit card number and told me he would head out to put a sold sign on a 2002 4 door Civic EX in silver. We arranged to meet with him on Saturday to finish up the paperwork.

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It’s about that time…approximately every year I end up growing unhappy with the website and I overhaul it. This year I’m overhauling with wordpress. I’ve also upgraded to the redesigned gallery2. I found a plugin for wordpress that integrates gallery2 with wordpress. That’s cool – no more disjoint applications for this site!