Santander

Hey my first rant is about a Bank and their 'wonderfull' service / systems...

Background:

My girlfriend has been with Abbey National (now Santander) for years; I am well versed at how rubbish their customer service is, so you may wonder why I got involved with the Bank in the first place.  

It was my own fault really for being a balance transfer whore and I'd miss-timed the latest card swap - I'd been charged interest and was looking for the best deal, sadly Santander was my only financially reasonable option.  I signed up for the card and sat back and got the card no problems.

Problem:

Their website and their telephone systems. I like to save paper and do all my banking online, which for other banks is an easy process. Turns out Santander, the third largest Bank in the World, can't seem to make this easy to setup. Their online registration kept failing on my card number (definitely not user error) so I couldn't continue; so I turned to the phone registration ... I detest telephone systems that ask you every question under the sun about your card number, date of birth, size of your left testicle to "help put you through to the right person" to then hear the call being forwarded to various on-hold systems, ringing, promotional information, more ringing and on-hold and "your call is important" messages to finally get through to an operator.

However, once through you get asked the same questions again about your card number, name ... testicle size. Just get the system to pass the information on rather than costing me more money on the phone.

Further info:

I feel slightly better for ranting about it .. although it's not the most annoying thing I've had recently.