You Cannot Put a Chicken On Your Head

Published on 9 April 2005 in Money, Alliance and Leicester, banks

Don’t you just love it when you contact a provider and say "Why am I not able to do this? What’s the logic in not being able to do it? It makes no sense."

And they reply with the answer that says "It is not possible to do that, because you cannot that."

It’s like a child saying to their parent "Why can I not put a chicken on my head?" and the parent decides not to tell the child that the chicken would fall off, that it would hurt, or even worse, it would probably poo on their head, but instead decides to reply with "You cannot put a chicken on your head because I’m not letting you put a chicken on your head".

No answer. No explanation.

Inspired – inevitably – by the Alliance and Leicester for whom when asked

the question, why their account setup means that I can not transfer money

from my Online Saver directly to my Direct ISA without going through an

intermediate Current Account, merely replied:

"The Online Saver account works alongside a nominated current account and this is the only possible destination for any transfers."

Email from Alliance and Leicester’s Internet Banking Helpdesk

Which just makes you want to scream and say “But WHY?” Why did you set up

your accounts so stupidly that this simple, trivial task is actually

impossible? Why don’t you allow your customers to do something so

trivial, so simple, so cheap, so easy?

Dealing with accounts held external to the organisation I can understand,

but between two savings products held with the same organisation. Well

you begin to wonder about the brains of the people who think up these

schemes.

On the plus side, they claim they’re looking into the fact that their

email form deletes your messages…