Wells Fargo Takes My Money

I rode to work this morning and Karla's paycheck and deposit slip were still in my bag. I thought, what the heck, I'll ride through the Wells Fargo drive-through lanes and try depositing again. If they say no, I'll just loop around to the drive-through ATM and do it there.

I circled through the parking lot to look at the hours. The office opens at 9:00AM, the drive-throughs open at 7:00. It was shortly before 8:30. Perfect.

I rode into the drive-through lane, stuck the check and slip into the canister, hit the button, and Whoosh!, off she goes. The teller communicated with me twice.

"Good morning sir"

"You're all set."

Whoosh! Then some more whooshing. And some more. The vacuum thing was malfunctioning. It finally popped up and I took out the canister and got my deposit slip (8:29AM) and the door closed immediately and more whooshing started.

"Sir, we're having some difficulties with the tubes."
"What should I do with this?" I yelled over the whooshing, holding up the canister.
"Sir, I'm sorry but we can't hear when the vacuum's running."

So I did a maneuver that would be tough in a car, pulled a U-turn, went over the curb and up to the front door, and left the canister there. This is actually more direct that my usual route, a left onto County E and then an immediate left onto Pine Tree, like I do in a car. As I rode out of the driveway a guy opened to the door and got the canister.

"Thank you sir!" he called, and I waved back.

So, what happened here? Did the awesome power of the blogosphere bring Wells Fargo weeping to its knees in a series of emergency weekend meetings to discuss drive-through policies? Did these morning tellers screw up and take my money against the rules, the scofflaws? Did Friday represent the small-minded application of obscure teller procedures or the perhaps the raw exercise of arbitrary power, a poor example of employee empowerment? Maybe they can take deposits from bicycles when the office is closed, and I've always deposited in the morning previously and so never had a problem? I'm not sure.

My own paycheck is automatically deposited, so it'll be July 15 before we have another one to deposit (unless y'all want to send me checks, which I will deposit all over town as an experiment!). In the meantime, I am going to seek clarification on this. I am on the Supervisory Committee of Heartland Credit Union (where we have savings accounts and our car loan) so will be able to talk to our President and staff about this and can ask to see insurance policies and the like if need be. I am also going to call Wells Fargo and seek clarification about their policy, though the downside of this is that they do for some reason refuse to take deposits and reinforce this in the course of teller training and I won't even be able to make deposits in the morning. I'll keep you informed.