SEB bank and evil overlords

I have blogged before about my problems with banks, personal numbers and bureaucracy while living in Sweden. I thought I was out of it and had finished with the whole thing. It turns out I am not yet done.

As I left Sweden, I was still waiting for one last payment. I had tried to get the money while I could still take them out from a Swedish bank, so I could finish the account properly, but they didn't arrive. As it was a sum of some substance I didn't want to just forget about it, and by the time I found the money hadn't been paid while I was still in Sweden, it was too late to change method of payment. So, I made a deal with the SEB bank. I'd empty the account from Norway, down until I had less than 100 S kr left. Then they would close the account on a certain date, if it contained less than 100 S kr.

A few days before the set date the money arrived, and I cleaned out the account and cut the card to pieces. End of story, I thought.

Not that easy.

Turns out I in the process of ending it, ended up owing the bank. Not a big sum, about the same as the bank could potentially have owed me as part of the deal to close the account. I was really surprised, I had a debet card after all, I thought I couldn't take out more than I had in the account.

The problem is, I am about to ruin my credit record over a ridiculous sum, because I thought the story was over, so I didn't change the address on the account and hence got no notifications - and the bank didn't agree with me, and didn't cancel the account, and sent notifications to the old address.

So now with the expenses, the amount has doubled several times. What I owed by the time the University in Umeå forwarded my mail is no longer something I could have asked a friend in Sweden to cover, and I need to figure out a way to pay. Of course talking to the Norwegian SEB doesn't help. I need to deal with SEB Sweden, and that I have already discovered several times over is not particularly easy.

Oh well, this is the punishment for thinking something could be easily fixed, and systems are fool-proof. Both assumptions are wrong, at least in this case. So here I go again, the saga of Swedish banking continues...

Day of the Swedish Flag

I should have known, but the Swedes kept saying "it's nothing like in Norway" when talking about the Swedish national holiday. So now I am in an empty university, where even the automatic window opener refuses to work. The day "nobody takes seriously" is at least a serious opportunity for a day off. So I am out of here, and off to find my camera. Now I know what they were preparing in Gammlia this morning!

As a side note: tomorrow is the date of the end of the Swedish/Norwegian union, in 1905.