Grrrrrr...

I recently had to apply for a fairly hefty loan, and the first payment should be due sometime in mid-December. In theory, the payments should be automatically deducted from my account (I got the loan from the same bank I have my account with)...but having had some experience with these things, I wanted to make sure. Because I really don't want to miss the first payment.

So I checked my bill pay schedule, and it wasn't listed there. Fine; that doesn't necessarily mean anything. The automatic deduction may be a different process from payments I set up myself, and probably wouldn't be reflected there. But that meant I needed to check my loan account, which of course (because it can't ever be easy) has an entirely different login ID and password.

I enter what I think are my ID and password for that account, and it tells me one or the other is wrong. I try a couple of variations on each, and those fail. So I go through the whole rigmarole of recovering my login ID...which turns out to be what I thought it was in the first place.

That means I have to jump through the 'forgot your password?' hoops. I click on that link, enter my ID when prompted, and it gives me the secret question: What street did you grow up on?

What the fuck? That has got to be the dumbest fucking question in the history of questions. By the time I was 18, I had lived on 6 different streets; in theory, the answer could have been any of them. It becomes a matter of guessing how I would have interpreted the question when I first set up the account. So I figure what I probably put down was the street we lived on when I was born, and I enter that. Except then the question is, how to enter the street name? Did I spell out _______ Drive? Did I abbreviate it to _______ Dr? Did I leave out the Drive altogether? Not a fucking clue.

Whatever it was, I entered it wrong, and I got a 'your account information is locked due to way too many failed logins, you pathetic loser' message. So I can't get back into the account without calling some phone number and actually talking to someone, which I hate, and giving them a whole bunch of information that almost certainly includes the loan number, which I don't have the slightest idea what it is without going into my loan account to find out.

And the kicker, of course, is that the odds are pretty good that all of this aggravation is completely unnecessary in the first place.

Grrrrr....

[That's all, folks]