Banking on it

Today was a truly momentous day. I've been in India almost seven months now, and today I was given the ability to take money out of our joint bank account! Woo Hoo! Today, Aashish, my new favourite bank employee, handed me my pin number, which goes with the debit card he handed me last week. So there's the happy ending - back to the beginning.

I can't say we've been trying to get my own debit card for the whole seven months...we didn't put much effort in for the first couple of weeks. In September, Rod's company changed the bank they used to pay the wages into. We used this opportunity to set up a joint account. Now you'd think if you told the guy from the bank who brought fifty million forms for you to fill in (for the Indians do like their form filling) that you wanted a joint account, then he'd give you the right forms so you'd get a joint account where both parties could equally use the account. But no... It seems the forms put my name on the account and gave me a telephone identification number so I could call up and find out how much was in the account, but nothing else. Now, while this is nice, it doesn't help me pay for groceries at the supermarket. Nor does it allow me to use a cash machine. Can you see the flaws in this scheme? I know I can.

Unfortunately Rod and I mistook my telephone identification number (TIN) as my PIN, and assumed my debit card was on the way. When it didn't arrive, we assumed it was a victim of the Indian postal service and called to alert the bank. The bank, once they'd found an employee who had some command of the English language, told us no debit card had been requested for me. What of all those forms we filled in, Rod asked? We might have filled in lots of forms, maybe even one requesting a debit card for me, but now they wanted us to fill them in again. Unfortunately those forms never arrived in the post... Feeling face to face was the only way to achieve our goal of a debit card each, we went to our local branch to try again. This is where we met Aashish.

Aashish helped us fill in all the forms, and a debit card was on the way to me. Of course, it didn't arrive. For the person inputting our information into the computer back when we filled in the first forms misread the A151 in the address, so according to bank records we live at AISI (using letters I and S instead of numbers 1 and 5) Westend Heights. Now this is close enough for us to receive bank statements and all other correspondence from the bank, but just not close enough for me to get my card. So after having waited for the post an appropriate amount of time, we went back to Aashish. He looked up in his records and said the card had been sent. We told him it may well have been, but we didn't have it. He made a few phone calls, and discovered my card had been returned undelivered, to Chennai. Now, for those of you who are a little unsure of your Indian geography, maybe struggling to find a map with boundaries the Indian government approves of, Chennai (formerly Madras) is over two thousand kilometres from Gurgaon. Hmmm, not helpful...

But Aashish was not to be detterred. He requested my debit card to be delivered to my branch, so I could pick it up there. This I did last Thursday. I was almost excited, until Aashish asked me if I had requested a pin number to be sent with the card. I told him I was unaware I needed to put in a separate request - silly me had assumed they would send a pin number as well as a card. So there was another form to fill in...Once again we decided it would be quicker to have the pin number sent to the branch. Nine days later...

And if you think we should change banks to a better one, I'm not sure better ones exist. I was discussing (okay, whinging!) to one of the other new arrival Mums and she told me every time she withdrew money from a cashpoint machine, her bank sent a text message confirming her transaction - to her husband!