I have been trying for approximately one year and 5 months
to set up a single retirement account for Taylor through Merrill Lynch at Bank
of America. I have hence come to the conclusion that Taylor will work until he dies, because the only other option is me dying long before retirement age from
exploding in the middle of one of these banking centers.
One day back in July of TWENTY-EIGHTEEN I was like hey,
Taylor, you need to get your chit together on those retirement accounts. And by
that I mean tag along with me to Bank of America so I can direct the
proceedings as you sign the papers.
So we make an appointment at a branch in Delaware with a guy
named George. Because what else would an aged, pot-bellied white guy who
manages finances at a big corporation be named? Men like that are bound to go
by one of approximately five names. You know it’s true. How they've come to rule the world is a mystery to me.
My goals for this appointment were very straight forward. I
informed George of these goals.
George proceeded to spend the next hour bellowing about
democrats in Florida in between opening up the account I requested and telling
me I had to “call the back office” anytime I asked for anything else. I remain
uncertain as to the identity of these presumably swarthy characters in the
“back office”.
Some other downtime was spent chatting about his 22-year old son who has no job and lives with George rent-free. But fear not, George was taking him on a cruise in a few weeks. That should fix things right up.
So we left that day with a new but entirely useless
retirement account because there was no time to call the back office to fund
said account or to allocate those funds in any way, mostly because much of the
extra time had been taken up talking about those damn Floridian democrats. Honestly
I thought Florida was made up entirely of retired republicans, but either way,
this was no time to be discussing it.
This was annoying to say the least, and I said as much when
I filled out a customer service survey a few days later. This turned out to be
a grave mistake because when I sent Taylor back a few weeks later to try and
sort out this account, George greeted him by saying, “I read what Tiffany wrote
about me”. Perhaps this is why Taylor’s visit that day still resulted in
exactly not a damn thing.
All of this amounted to me being more irritated than usual
and completely unwilling to do anything about it. I have an excellent
habit of avoiding things that piss me off, so that’s precisely what I did for
approximately one year. The retirement account and the funds intended for it remained in flux
for the rest of our time in Delaware and through our move away from there and George
the terrible.
After like 4 months in our new city I felt that I was ready
to stop avoiding the situation, buoyed by the fact that we were in a new place
with a new financial representative that couldn’t possibly be as inept as the
santa-bellied George.
WELL I WAS WRONG. So thanks for coming to part one of my
two-part series on how utterly impossible adulting appears to be. BRB with part
two.
