Change Of Address

Of all the things that need to be co-ordinated when you move, you really wouldn’t think that getting your bank to change your address would be one of the most difficult bits, would you? And in general, it wouldn’t be. Unless you happen to have the Manchester branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland as your account’s ‘home’. And ooh, lucky me, that’s exactly the problem.

In general, dealing with RBS isn’t a problem. I use the online banking, that’s fine. I go into the Cambridge branch, or the Reading one, and everything happens quickly, smoothly, and efficiently. If anything has to go back to my ‘home’ branch though, it goes tits up at high speed.

I don’t know what it is that makes the Manchester branch of RBS into such a bunch of useless bastards, but I do know it’s consistent in its crapness. (Actually, I do have a suspicion about what the problem is – it’s that I had a business account with them as well, and I’ll lay money that somewhere in their system, anything to do with my personal account still goes through the business section)

This time, as with when we moved to Norfolk in December, I called the phone banking section to do the change of address. All fine, apparently. Except that I know they have to send some kind of paper-trail document to the Manchester branch for them to process. Why, I’ve no idea. But that’s the way it is. Joined up banking with the RBS, oh yes.

And when the address change document goes to Manchester, it gets lost. Or mislaid. Or screwed-up and thrown in a bin. I don’t know. What I do know is that it doesn’t get processed. So ten days later, I call the phone banking people again, and ask why it hasn’t been done. Oh, we don’t know – the system says the address has changed, but the Manchester processing centre hasn’t activated it. Why? We don’t know. It must be a small system glitch.

Aye, right. That ‘small system glitch’ is also known as ‘it entered the document black hole called Manchester Processing Centre’.

We’ll see if the change gets processed this time, now I’ve invoked a formal complaint…