The case of the $66 Nintendo64
On Friday I made a rare trip to Wells Fargo. Last week I bought a Nintendo64 on eBay (to fuel my Zelda habit) and also sold an old laptop battery. Unfortunately, I forgot PayPal was set up to use my Wells Fargo account.
The account is a relic of the z-edit days; I kept about $4 in it rather than go through the hassle of closing it, but with the Nintendo purchase, my account was overdrawn. Wells Fargo, ever helpful, called me the next day to inform me of the overdraft and the $33 fee they would be charging for covering the paypal payment. I quickly transferred the money I made from selling the battery from paypal to the account, but with the fee I was still about $4 short, so I had to physically go in to the branch to make a deposit.
At the teller counter I wrote myself a check for $20 and tried to deposit it, but it turned out that my account was inactive (I hadn't used it, except for this paypal annoyance, for about four years), and so the teller needed her supervisor.
Her supervisor, in turn, would have needed to call upstairs to customer relations in order to activate the account, just so I could deposit the $20. Instead of calling them, she waived the $33 fee: so my account was now in the black, and I didn't need to deposit any money.
It was easier for the supervisor to give me free money than to re-activate my account. Bad Wells Fargo. Bad bad bad!