Reader Kevin writes in with one of those stories that makes you feel like pulling your hair out. He can’t access his online account with National City and they can’t help him.

We join Kevin as he calls National City to see if they can help him access his account:

So I dial the number provided and find that it dumps me into the standard no apparent way out IVR phone system and I find that no option on the main menu pertains to getting help with the web site. Hmmm. What to do, what to do. So I proceed to bang on the 0 till the phone rings again. Now I am dropped into the queue waiting for a live body. A lovely lady with a very thick accent who we shall call Maria comes on the line and offers her assistance. “How may I help you?” She asks. I proceed to explain my predicament and she quickly says “no problem, let me pull that up and see what is the matter.”

After some furious tapping on her end she comes back with “oh I am sorry sir you don’t seem to be registered on our web site.” To which I quickly respond “thats funny then how was I able to access the site in the past without an account?” A perplexed Maria comes back with “oh well we installed a new program back in October and if you haven’t used the system since then you will need to register.” I reminded Maria that I had already tried that and that the system was saying that there is already an account set up, I am just the dork who cant remember one of his 63 user id’s on a site that is at the bottom on my regular use list. An even more perplexed Maria comes back with “have you tried to register again?” Of course I reminded Maria again of why I was calling. Then the hammer is dropped. Maria proceeds to tell me “I am sorry sir there is nothing else I can do for you then since you don’t have an account on the system.”

At this point my jovial mood was beginning to sour and in an effort to not resort to verbal abuse I asked “is there another group that I can be transferred to that can help me resolve this problem?” Maria regretfully explains in no uncertain terms NO. My only option is to have Maria send an email to some mythological group that might be able to sprinkle some pixie dust and banish the ghosts in the database that are holding my records hostage. I ask for the email address so that I may contact them directly and Maria informs me that “it is an internal address and cannot be given out. ” So needless to say I do not have the information I am looking for but I am now more concerned about the validity of the records they have about my mortgage. Does it make you nervous that a company like National City Mortgage who are in the business of maintaining millions of records of billions of dollars of mortgage payments. balances and such cant get a simple join between my account and my login that their interface can find but their backend side cant? Am I just stuck in cyber limbo?

So what is really burning me at the moment is that I have no recourse. There apparently isn’t anyone I can talk to to help resolve this and am now at the mercy of some group of guys probably a lot like me that have a lot of other stuff to deal with then to research something that they will get and attribute to a problem on my end and I will fall to the bottom of the pile because I cant have the conversation with them directly.

Ugh. Here’s a PDF with the names of everyone on the board of directors for National City. Maybe you could talk to some of them?

National City Mortgage has ghosts in their database. [Gray Drake]

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