NatWest, the helpful bank? It just goes on and on - and on

Yes, it's not over till the fat lady sings and she's still only humming.

Last week we discovered that despite the length and breadth of the initial meeting, there were several unsigned documents that needed signing, in triplicate, in blood. These could not be emailed, only faxed or mailed and if faxed, the original had to be sent in the mail too for an original signature.

I don't even have a fax machine anymore. Here in the 21st century, we regular, non-banking folk usually find that email is the quickest, most efficient and cheapest way of moving documents around quickly. We did away with carrier pigeons and faxes some while ago.

Then, someone from the Chief Executive's office eventually called me - that was last Thursday I think - a full ten days after I sent my letter of complaint. By banking standards, that was probably quite fast. He wanted to know if everything was resolved so I made the right noises and explained that their Mike Jones from High Barnet is now looking after us. "I'll give him a call if I can track him down" he said. I offered him Mike Jones's contact details to which the reaction was "thank you so much, you have no idea how difficult it is to get people's contact details within this organisation". I was momentarily speechless. Eventually, I spluttered "what a terrible indictment on your internal systems".

"Yeah, tell me about it" he replied.

Enough said.