thank you, my inner banker

i plan one way and it works out another way. case in point. i figure i need fifteen minutes tops to reconcile a bank statement. after all it looks short, less than half a page. i'm sailing exactly half way through when, boom, something jarring catches my eye. what's that nineteen dollar charge from the bank about? so i look into it. half an hour later, this is what i find out. some nice employee arranged, a while back, to waive monthly service fee on the account if the daily minimum balance is not less than four thousand dollars. i said, we can do that. so far it has been fine. somehow, somewhere along the line the bank's system bumped us up to another kind of account, something called 'value pack.' why? simply because the balance has been increasing and, above a certain dollar amount, the system triggers the upgrade. hwubby asks, how is this 'value pack' different from what we have right now? after mumbling something like, there are some small differences, the girl at the bank kind of whispers into hwubby's ear over the phone, well, actually, there really isn't much difference. the only big difference i can tell is this 'value pack' requires a daily minimum balance of eight thousand dollars. and for a few days in november the balance was five thousand. we don't even have to tell the girl what we want. without asking any questions she immediately changes our account back to what we had before this 'value pack' nonsense and credit us nineteen dollars.

so, there you have it. i have plans and the universe has its own plans. when it's all said and done it's an hour more than what i plan. i also realize that, with all due respect to bankers, they really count on people who have more than a full plate in their lives and don't look line by line into their statements, and even if they do, they just assume that the bank doesn't charge incorrectly. thank you, my inner banker, for giving me the strength and clarity to see what it needs to be taken of and stand up to ask the question on my mind. why is it this way? this is not what i remember how we were informed.