Felix Salmon has an instructive piece up about WaMu's atrocious mortgage sevicing. Ha, I thought it was just me. I had a little mortgage that got assigned to WaMu a few years back; I paid it off and went looking for the release on the deed of trust. I couldn't get anybody at WaMu to even admit they owned the damn thing--although I concede their denials were probably sincere, if wrong-headed, in that the folks I talked to probably didn't have any idea what they owned.
I finally deployed a tactic long recommended by my friend Ignoto: I wrote a detailed but patient and non-paranoid letter to the CEO, trusting that if only I could get into the system at the power level, my problem might get solved. Sure enough, a few days later comes a call from a local manager I'd never heard of before saying "you're in luck! Your release just reached my desk this morning!"
Yeh, right. I might add that what we see here is not just WaMu, it's a general business model. Think of the number of places--communications, health care, investment management, whatever--where somebody buys a book of business figuring he'll learn what he has bought, oh, I dunno, maybe when hell freezes over. Meanwhile it is left for the poor sods on the customer service lines--and the apopleptic customers like me--to try to sort out what the heck is going on.
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