A Tale of Two Credit Cards!

Such in-a-soup stories need to be told, because they mostly are about all those faceless people who normally have no voice. It doesn’t matter if the stories were my personal ones or somebody else’s. As you must be aware a writer or a storyteller has the choice of being the narrator in the first person or in the third person, and in post-modern storytelling even in the second person. Well, right? As you also must’ve been aware all the time that several essential services like banking were spared during the pandemic lockdowns, and as far as services at the bank branches are concerned the pandemic hit them real hard with thousands of their staff members getting the infection leading to manpower shortages which was really unfortunate. However, the pandemic had a definitive role in making online transactions a way of life, forcing even the traditionally manual-obsessed customers go for online activities. Therefore, when I discovered a bank failing even in that minimum of online presence I had to feel disgusted. This brings me to the first credit card.

 

I’d been having a credit card for years issued by that particular bank where I didn’t have an account. During the first national lockdown the bank literally went into a stupor: not informing about or updating the transactions; not generating online monthly statements and mailing those promptly; contacting them through the helpline was also a wasted exercise as no one really attended the calls. All these created a total blackout for me as regards my card. To make matters worse the bank, one of the worst and confirmed misers in the industry, kept on sending useless text promos like offering offensive cashbacks of 50 or maximum 100 bucks for a transaction of over 20k bucks and like offering to increase their consistently miserable credit limit by only a few thousand bucks.

 

One day I was caught up in such a severe fit of rage, also accentuated perhaps by the monotonous stay-home syndrome that I cut up the credit card in as many as possible pieces and threw those into the dustbin. After the act I mailed them a request to close my card account which compulsorily involved another clumsily manual process: that they don’t take closure requests online or on phone and I have to log in to their net banking site, type my request in their form, have to take a printout and send it by post to them as if I were a free bird during the lockdown. My previous experiences in their net banking were horrible: they never save my credentials and passwords; and so, every time I try to log in I have to rediscover myself and create new and newer user IDs and passwords. I gave it up.

 

To my horror a solitary statement appeared informing me that I had unpaid balances. Furious, I emailed them again, asking them why they didn’t close my account and how on earth was I to make the payment as I no longer had the full 16-digit card number with me. Like all other banks they wanted their money back at any cost, and therefore, one executive found time to send me an email asking me to make the payment using a temporary 16-digit number generated for the same purpose. I made the payment, reiterating my request to close my account as I couldn’t possibly use it without having either the card or its number.

 

For the next one year I forgot about the card, but at times feared that the bank might again charge me the annual fee. And then the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) new guidelines on credit cards that are to be effective from the 1^st of July this year came just in time, and one of which guidelines say that a bank has to close a credit card account that is not used for more than a year. Accordingly, a jubilant ‘me’ receives a text message from the bank giving me a notice period of one month to try renewing my card or the card would cease to exist after that! I give three cheers to the RBI! Credit card users must also know now that as per another guideline a bank can no longer insist on a manual application for a closure request and has to complete the closure after a telephonic or online request within seven days to avoid paying a daily penalty to the customer.

 

The second credit card is of an existential kind! A bank where I had to open a savings account for some reasons offered me a credit card, full of discounted offers and lifetime free. However, the offer from a polite lady executive of the bank came on telephone when I was stranded out of town for the first lockdown. Therefore, I also politely informed her that since I was in another town I wouldn’t possibly be able to receive the card at my registered address. To that, even more politely, the lady asked me for the new address and noted it down with painstaking care, doubly assuring me that the card would arrive at my new address.

 

A fortnight later, though, I got a message from the courier that they missed me at that registered address. The card was never delivered even after I came back to my registered address. However, the offers continued to flourish in my phone, mails and the bank’s net banking site. The bank was caught in their own web of half-truths when one of their executives phoned me offering me a personal loan on the credit card that never existed, and I grabbed the opportunity with my both hands and asked him a simple question, ‘Where is my card, my dear provider?’. He took it in with a remarkable restraint and assured me all the needful would be done.

 

Accordingly, a representative arrived at my home and the application process was done one more time. I got all the communication as regards the ETA, so to say! That card too never arrived, even after a full year. However, the card still exists in my net banking account and in terms of a plethora of insistently luring offers. So then, this is the story about the second credit card that I cannot use even virtually.