I had a Citibank credit card. Technically, I still have it but I will be closing the account shortly. My recent experience has been a not-so-rare glimpse at how strange the business practices of a mega-corporation can be sometimes. This is not a story about fraudulent charges or bad customer service, just a sequence of events that made me doubt their ability to competently run their own business.

1) The story starts a few months ago when we received an ominous letter telling us that our card had been compromised and that we needed to contact their customer service people immediately. With us both in full possession of the cards, our overall rare use of the card (it's mostly backup for the rare occasions when our primary card won't scan or decides to go on fraud-alert freak out, or for when I'm traveling to help keep track of expenses), and my fairly elaborate attempts to keep our personal information protected (crosscut shredder, receive electronic billing statements only, etc) I wondered how that was possible and wondered if it was some kind of Citibank ad campaign.

It turns out that they were the ones who were compromised; Citibank had lost our information, and then sent us a letter making it look like they had ingeniously detected some fraud and proactively addressed it. They insisted on sending us a new card and an affidavit in case we needed to report fraudulent activity. They were not amused by my wife's sardonic questioning regarding their ability to protect this new account number any better than the previous one.

2) When I received the new card,we had to call to activate it as is customary. Normally, you dial a number and get an automated message asking you to enter the number and then it is activated almost immediately. We recently received a new card for our primary credit card account because it had expired and this is exactly what was necessary to activate the card. Citibank on the other hand has "pioneered", at least I experienced it with anyone else, the use of a live person to activate your card when you call. This provides them with the opportunity to cram some sort of up-sell gimmick down your throat when all you were expecting was an automated message.

This time around it was the new "credit protection" plan that everyone wants to sell you, where for a fee based on your balance, you can skip a payment (or 2 or 3?) if you lose your job or you have a serious medical incident or one of the other horrible qualifying conditions. I tried to explain to him that regardless of the fact that I don't take part in fear-based nonsense, if I instead took the money I would have been paying for the credit protection and stuck it in a savings account, I would easily be able to cover a minimum payment for a few months. Insurance only makes sense if the gap between the cost to insure and the cost to replace/repair is high (home insurance), or qualifying conditions are likely (car insurance). In this case, it wasn't even close. I wasted 10 minutes of my life trying to get off the phone without being rude, and then finally resorted to being rude since I had only called to activate my f&@$ing card.

3) After activating the new card I went to log on to the card site to check that everything was in order. Of course, I was naive to assume that because this card was the logical successor to the previous one, that card would show up. Instead, it showed our old account as closed and nothing else. I was forced to create a whole new username and account for this new card. That was annoying, but not terrible. It will be turn out to be important later on though.

4) This is more of an annoyance than a real part of the story: Citibank revamped their credit card website, and now whenever you go there you get a pop-over add thing that blocks out your access to their actual website until you click a few things. It's like they created a DIV that they position over the site, but instead of just making it the size of the ads, it blocks out the entire site with white. And this is just to show me ads for a product I already own. Keep in mind that I had to click through that thing a zillion times during the course of the ordeal I am about to describe.

5) A few weeks ago, I made a payment on the web site scheduled to take effect a few days later. A day after the day it was to be debited, I got an email from Citibank thanking me for my payment. I went and looked at our bank account and there was no charge. That seemed odd and I chalked it up to a timing glitch with online processing. When I checked the next day, still no charge. Then it hit me, I had another bank account that I had been using previously but which now had like $100 in it but I was too lazy busy to close. Going to look at that other account, I noticed that sure enough, a charge had been attempted and of course rejected for insufficient funds.

I was really mad for 2 reasons: first, I had no idea that bank account was even on that new card's account. It had been on my old Citibank card, and without telling me, Citibank had brought over that old information to the new account I opened. So it never occurred to me to double check that I had the right bank account selected because I didn't even realize that there was more than one. Why they could link my bank account after the fact, but forced me to create a whole new card account is beyond me. Second, why can't they ask if you have the funds available without actually debiting it? It seems silly for me to pay a bounced check fee when there is no person receiving the check, and no goods changing hands, etc. Why should electronic funds work exactly the same as physical funds? Especially with a huge conglomerate like Citibank would could save themselves and their customers huge hassles with a better system.

6) Now it got fun. My credit card statement showed that it had been paid, despite the fact that there was evidence that it had been rejected by my bank, so I couldn't just make another payment and be done with it because you can't pay more than your remaining balance. I called customer service who explained that they must not have been notified yet (which seems unlikely since it showed up in my online banking statement) but that the problem was that Citibank might keep trying to debit the amount depending on "what response they received back from my bank". So I was supposed to call my bank and find out how they would have marked the rejection, either as insufficient funds, or just denied. If it was insufficient funds, they might just keep retrying, with me incurring a new charge every time! She insisted that this was all done electronically and her hands were tied.

I called my bank and actually got someone who understood what I needed to know. He advised me that given that it wasn't an active bank account and had only a small amount of money, I should just close it and make it impossible for them to retry and incur additional charges, which I did (thanks guy at bank, you are the only person in this entire thing that had any interest in helping me!)

7) Fast-forward to today. Ten days after I originally got the bounced check notification, Citibank finally notified me about it. The best part is that their email says, in a nutshell "since your bank account was closed, we have disabled your on-line payment functionality until you call customer service". Remember that I have a perfectly valid bank account that I have used several times before to pay this card, and it was only because they decided to bring over an older bank account unexpectedly that this happened, and that I had already spoken to their customer service to explain the problem and was given essentially no alternatives. So now I can't pay the bill on line any more and have to call them. I guess I would have needed to call to close the account anyway.

The thing that bothers me most is that Citibank will feign interest in my leaving them when I call to close it, but they ultimately don't care about people like me except in some sort of aggregate statistical way. I feel at every turn their message is "we don't really care about making you angry or costing you time and money if it means we might make a few extra bucks because of sheer volume", which I'm going to call the "spam theory of business". After a decade of card membership with an ever increasing level of disinterest on their part, it's time for me to stop rewarding them.