TD Bank made a real mess when they made massive system changes. I’ve heard about the problems customers are having on the news, and now I find I’m one of them, too.

I used to have an account at Commerce Bank, which I liked. Then Commerce Bank’s president got in trouble, the bank got in trouble, and TD Bank bought Commerce. All was still well until last week, when TD Bank launched an “improved” online banking website.

Now I can’t get Quicken to connect with TD Bank any more. I followed the directions from TD Bank for re-establishing this connection, but what the directions say should happen doesn’t actually work. I’m stuck and can’t find a way around it.

So I called for help, which Commerce always was good at providing. I’ve been on hold for about half-an-hour now. My first call was declined — I was simply told by a recording to try later. Maybe I should have listened, but I want to get my banking done now, not later.

My second (current) call was answered promptly by a functionary who asked the nature of my call. I explained that Quicken won’t work with their online service any more. After 20 minutes on hold, my call was taken by a beleaguered customer service representative who was not familiar with technical details of online services. He needed to transfer me to online services.

Wait, why wasn’t my call sent there in the first place? He had no idea, and he wasn’t interested in hearing my complaints about my time having been wasted. He gave the perfunctory apology, but declined to pass my complaint along to where it could do some good for future callers. “It’s too big a system,” he explained.  He had no idea who to contact or complain to, and just wanted to get me off the line.

So I am still on hold as I write this. Starting to feel like Charlie on the MTA.

UPDATE:

It has been 90 minutes now. My call was finally, clumsily answered after an hour (there was silence for so long I thought they had disconnected me, then there was a fumbling around sound for a few seconds and finally a human voice spoke). I got transferred to the right department after 60 minutes on hold!

And then I felt like the straight man in “Who’s On First” as I tried to explain what keeps happening to me.

It took half an hour to get to her best solution for me, and I rejected it. Turns out TD Bank wants me to delete all my pending transactions that I scheduled on their website (not in Quicken). After I do that, I can follow the rest of their instructions and hope it works this time. And then I get to re-create the transactions that I deleted.

Instead, I created a new account in Quicken, while I was waiting on hold for an hour. And I found it pulled in my pending transactions just fine. The stupid thing is that now I have my data in two separate accounts. But after totally wasting 90 minutes on this exercise, I’d rather settle for that than go through more hoops.

TD Bank has a long, long way to go to convince me that I want to remain as their customer.