Commonwealth Bank - three weeks to prove I'm me :s

Oh well, it's providing sort of a strange entertainment for me. Like a morbid fascination with the bureaucracy of Australia's Commonwealth Bank. It's starting to look rather as bad as Centrelink.

This has been going on now for three weeks since my first visit to the financial councilor from Wesley Mission. Admittedly yes he initially got my last name wrong (easy to do as I have a weird last name) but the problem is the Commonwealth Bank is doing everything by snail mail. Yes, snail mail, in 2015 FFS. They do use fax machines, but who the fuck at home has a fax machine?

Anyway, after filling out the form from the $bloke correcting the misspelling of my name the week before last, the $bloke rang the bank and faxed off the form from the Community Centre where he is for two days a week. Then two working days later I get a mysterious letter from the Commonwealth Bank. In it is an authority form from them to be filled out, instead of the one from Wesley Mission that we sent. Nothing else in the envelope. No explanation, no instructions, nothing but this blank authority form from them. WTF? Was the Wesley Mission authority form not good enough for them or some shit? Apparently not.

So I filled out my bit of it, and delivered it down the road to the Community Centre where the $bloke will be for a couple of days later in the week. I put a little note of explanation in it for him to fill out his bit and send it back to the bank, and also an email of explanation to him with a PDF scan of it.

As fate would have it however he was sick for those two days later in the week and only got back to work this morning. At which time he rang me, saying he was sending the form off today, but that the bank still wanted me to attend the bank with proof of ID. This all had to be done before the bank would talk to him at all. Fuck, why couldn't this all have been done by email? The bank would have had the form nearly a week ago.

So it was down to the bank earlier today to prove I was actually me :s Good grief. Which I did, and sent an email confirmation to the $bloke that I had in fact attended the local Commonwealth Bank branch and had proved that I was definitely me.

*sheesh*