That Feeling in the Pit of Your Stomach

I am rather fastidious about checking my banking account balances. I want to see when things have cleared, make sure that someone didn't finger-fumble an amount from $45.09 to $450.90, know that I didn't do a finger-fumble when transferring money from one account to another.

So yesterday, I had been downloading account information from our bank into my Quicken software and had just reconciled everything (which balanced, naturally). I went back to online banking and saw that a new item had cleared in the 20 minutes or so I was fiddling around with Quicken. I took out the register to find that check number... and found the check number - still in my possession!

That feeling in my stomach was somewhere between wanting to toss my cookies and wanting to kill someone. I was holding that check number in my hand - it hadn't made it to the mail yet - and yet someone else had cashed it. I immediately got on the phone to the bank, but thanks to their 'press 1 if you want butter on your bagel,' and 'press 2 if you want someone to slap a dead fish on your house,' I couldn't figure out how to get to a live human. So we grabbed the documentation and hustled over to the bank's local branch...

...where we promptly saw 8 people on the teller line, 4 people waiting to talk to the 1 poor schmuck who was in charge of everything except what the tellers did. We put our name on the list and after it became clear that it would take a while, I tried calling the bank's 800- number again. This time I managed to get a human (the initial help desk person, who's only job - she told me this - was to transfer calls to the 'right place')... who transferred me to another human (in Risk Operations)... who transferred me to another human (in Forgery). Right after speaking to the Forgery lady (which took a while), we were able to talk to a manager at the branch.

As it turns out, the check was presented by someone in a Castro Valley branch who deposited it into their own account at 3:03. We were in the bank by 3:30 and had a case number assigned and a new checking account by 4:15. I bet the Bad Guys weren't counting on trying to cheat someone as obsessive about her bank accounts like me!

In the end, we'll get our money back from the bank, we only had 2 outstanding checks (and both parties hadn't yet cashed them), and the bank is making sure we are not harmed financially by someone else being bad to us.

That feeling in the pit of my stomach is gone now.