The Frustrating Week that was

It all began with quite a startling discovery on the 03 of January 2008 that someone had used my supplementary credit card held in the name of my daughter to make unauthorized transactions to purchase plane tickets online on four occasion.So the bank immediately blocked the card when I made the report and faxed to me a disputed transaction form to be filled by my daughter. So the next day I faxed back the form duly completed and phoned the Bank to find out whether the fax was received or not and was told that it would take more than 24 hours to find out. That was rather inefficient considering that it's a foreign localised multinational well known entity. So I laid the matter to rest waiting for the 24 hour gestation period to lapse. But what followed after that was somewhat like the one-time popular series that was shown on RTM about twenty years ago, entitled the "Forsythe Saga".What I had to go through was like a "Saga" too, except it's not a product which most likely is going to be hot on the market soon to be launched. On the 09 Jan I called again and the guy from the Bank said that it had been received. To my surprise I received a short message that the fax had not been received and that was the beginning of the frustration for the week. I called the bank again on the 13 Jan and was told that I had to send again another fax because it wasn't clear enough. I wondered whether it was true because the message said clearly that I had not sent the form back to the Bank. So I sent another fax again but the lady on the other end said she could not receive it perhaps due to a technical problem on her fax machine. She asked me to fax again to another number and she could only check whether it was received on the next working day. Since it was a sunday, so she rang me up on tuesday to tell me that since there's no trace of the form, another fax is necessary. I flatly refused and told her off that what a rotten service the Bank had come to and put the phone down. On second thoughts I asked my daughter to fax the same form again from her office the next day. In my pique, I called again the Bank the next day to check and this person asked me to send another fax, again I said I am not going to but asked for the procedure on lodging a complaint to the Bank. She got to me again after a long pause because she had to consult her manager on my query. I was told to write officially to the Service Recovery Unit and they would investigate my complaint. So I wrote a long hand written complaint giving the chronolgy of events that had taken place from the 03 January on discovering the false transactions.Yesterday 17 January, I received a call saying that my new fax had been received without telling me which date and which number it was sent from and she quickly put the phone down before I could give her another shelling. So I am waiting for the outcome of the investigation which I had been given the understanding that it would take them 45 days to know the final outcome of the false transaction. Anyway I had emailed the Bank that I would like to terminate all my credit cards with the Bank to which I am still waiting for a reply. In my more than 30 years of having an account with the Bank which includes about more than 18 years of using their credit cards, this is the first time I had to face this blardy hassle and I am thinking of closing my account with it altogether once the matter has been resolved. I thought the public sector are laggards where service is concerned but this is a well known mutinational Bank which is opening up more branches and the CEO is an expatriate. It was much better when it was headed by a local guy. The moral of the story is, when you rest on your laurels, inevitably the way is a downward slide. The Brand name might not last long after all.