I just paid off my Honda Civic, which feels good. However, the process for doing so was uber-retarded. I went online to Chase.com and logged into my account by typing in my username 530… Hey, don’t try to trick me into giving away sensitive information! Anyway, I logged in, and clicked on the (finally present) ‘Pay off my car’ link. There I was presented with a really old address that I lived at over two years ago. I happened to live there when I bought the car 4 years ago. The instructions on the web site were to call an 800 number and change my address information to make the payoff.

So I called.

I did the rigamaroll of automated touch tone systems and then waited online with a 30 second loop telling me how important I was but that I’d have to wait my turn. I waited for not very long, which was nice. Then the gal on the other end of the line (which is a bad term since I was on my cell phone) asked for security reasons for me to confirm my address. I did. She told me that was wrong. I chuckled and thought, “Silly people have our old Ash lane address.” I was wrong. Turns out they have our old, old Ash lane address from when we first moved onto Ash lane (we moved downt he street later). The problem is that I haven’t used that address in years and so I had to look it up in my files. So I finally got her approval with the ancient address and then she wanted to change my address. Which I appreciate. Except that she then wanted to send me out new monthly payment coupons.

I explained again that I just wanted to pay off my car. She said I couldn’t do that over the phone, but I could do it online and via mail. The problem is that the mail system works poorly because if my envelope with check enclosed arrives one day late, they’ll charge me 43 cents for that day. Which means I could literally almost own my car. I could have a loan on my car for 43 cents and sit waiting, wondering what the heck was going on because the mail took a day too long. So I logged in (while on the phone) to my account again and got told by the server that their was an error!. There was an error all right! My car loan was through Chase-Manhatten. That was the error. Ford Credit, who handled my Stratus load, was outstanding. They were the best financial organization I’ve worked with as far as online information, telephone support and prompt handling of payments.

In the end, I let the chase.com site do its thing and finally it stopped having the error and I was able to initialize the payment. I’m hoping that the electricity doesn’t mess up my transaction and I can just breathe easier knowing I’m getting to a place where I can just have one huge payment per month for my house.

The other thing that irritated me is that I had called to change my address on the phone at Chase a long time ago (before I moved to CO) and then I’d changed it online with their ‘online address changing form.’ That apparently is not related to the ‘We have your account under a really old address’ database that they handle things with for the phone department. Why have the same set of information, related to the same account, related to the same customer, stored in many databases, not accessible to the different departments and not manageable by the customer on your online account editing page? Why do that? Because you can. Because you’ve got your customers locked into your system and they can’t do a thing about it. Nice, huh?

[Note: I can’t wait to hear Trint‘s story about what he had happen to him that makes my story seem like a graceful financial transaction.]