Once again, if I thought any of the others would be better to deal with? I would totally ditch HSBC.

Just had another lovely debit card declined episode, popping out to the store up the street before early Sunday closing. There should be at least £300 in the account, so I guess it must be their faulty fucking fraud protection flagging the account AGAIN. For no apparent reason.

There has literally never been a real problem, but I’m lucky to go a few months without that account or my credit card getting blocked. Rarely using the credit card probably helps with that, but the debit card is always a puzzler. For a while, using it on Google Play or Amazon usually got it flagged, but that’s the only “suspicious” pattern I have ever managed to work out there.

This time was extra embarrassing since I had about £5 less cash than the total, so I was there shuffling for change and had to get them to void a couple of items. And of course clogged that checkout up when they were trying to get everyone out to close. I was afraid to even try another card right then.

Hoping it will start working again on its own, like has happened before a few times. Since voice calls are a nightmare for my HOH ass, and that’s the only real way to try to get them to unblock things. Last time I tried using relay dealing with them, it was really not a good experience at all and they almost made me go to my assigned branch in person to straighten it out. (At Canary Wharf, when I am practically housebound these days.) The relay person was rude, assuming I couldn’t hear her at all, and the call center person obviously didn’t want to deal with relay at all.

So of course I fight feeling like a total fuckup at adulting, over their accessibility problems.

We’ll have to see, though.. Worst case, I guess it’s cash for a while. Which is inconvenient for Mr. C too, because guess who keeps needing to stop for some? And hopefully it would let me transfer some of that £300, as a decent chunk of the household budget 😬

It would just be really nice if I could depend on consistently having access to the money in my account. That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable expectation.

They are of course totally down with money laundering (and that’s another case to get some official attention…) But sure, they can make a show of doing something about petty fraud by repeatedly blocking smaller customers’ access to their own money, and making them scrounge for change at the grocery store checkout 😒