Scenario 2: I had issued a year’s worth of post dated check to my landlord. His place got broken into and those checks were taken. I call the hotline and try to cancel the checks issued by providing them the numbers and was told I had to go to my local branch to personally apply for that.
Next day, I go into my local bank and they tell me thank you for providing the checks numbers but it’s not a guarantee that it would stop those checks from being cashed by the bank. So if someone wanted to deposit the stolen checks to his bank or whatever means, and despite you warning your bank about those stolen check numbers, YOUR bank will have to charge you P1000 per checks refused. uh???? so the reason for me notifying my bank of stolen checks is what??? apparently means nothing. The only way to safeguard yourself is to close your bank account and open a new one. Ok, that makes perfect sense.

Finally back in NY, I opened a checking account online without ever having to visit a bank. I can take pictures of a check and have that deposited into my account while sitting at home. Went to the bank and had an ATM card issued in 3 mins (not 3 days) since I could not wait 3 days for the mailing to arrive. Convenience…it’s somehow lost in the Philippines.

Let’s be optimistic that the corporate world will manage to bypass the whole card thing and go straight to cell phone solutions. They seem to understand phones better. The sooner the better, as I’m tired of having to wait in line for 20 minutes at the ATM while somebody checks their account balance 14 times in a row, presumably hoping for a magically different answer to the one they got before.