You Can Check Out Any Time You Like

Some small progress has been made by my attempt to roll my money out of the pension fund of my erstwhile employer and into something more secure (he said hopefully). But nobody's making it easy. Which, I suspect, is the point.

I shared recently my futile attempt to access my ELCA Board of Pensions account online (Another Good Way to Alienate Customers!). I followed that time-waster with a call the next day to Customer Service, which also, initially, took me down a blind alley: Foolishly, since I wanted my pension account information, I chose the option for pension account information from the automated menu. This took me to the aural equivalent of the same Through the Looking-Glass experience as I had encountered online the day before, namely, the request for SSN and nonexistent PIN with no other options--certainly no opportunity to speak to a human being.

Hang up. Call again. Choose something different.

By and by I am talking to a person, and a nice one at that. He can't help me, but he switches me over immediately to the person who can. And, by golly, she does help me! I get the info I needed, and she pledges to send me a PIN--after informing me that it's possible that a PIN was never sent to me in the first place seven or eight years ago, which would make my searching for it the previous afternoon even more futile. But anyhow. The ELCA Board of Pensions should know that Brian and Corina are doing their best to rescue clients' opinion of their customer service, even as their own web interface undermines it.

Almost makes me feel bad for pulling my money out. Almost. The NPR story that spurred my decision to hit the exit reminds me that I have a choice: I can pull my money out or, potentially, have it pulled out from under me.

Also, e-mail I had from a Service Center Representative makes me less inclined to stick around. Another good way to alienate customers: Blame them for your poorly designed system. When I sent "feedback" after my loop-de-loop experience with the website on Sunday, I received back a sort-of apology but with a smarmy "if it were a system with a low security threshold it would not serve our requirements or your expectations" attached. Well, my expectation is that when your goddamn system gives me options for retrieving a forgotten PIN, your goddamn system will in fact provide the promised assistance and not send me off into a continuous loop. (There is a Forgot Your PIN? link, which presents two options, Answer Challenge Question and Mail a PIN Reminder. I tried both. And both times I received the same unhelpful message: The information you entered to log into the system does not match our records. Please Log In again now. Which is of course impossible without the PIN. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence that your pension fund doesn't recognize your Social Security Number, does it?) And my expectation is that, when your goddamn system doesn't work, you won't try to shove the blame back on me! Better your goddamn system provide no "help" links at all than links that provide no help.

Oh, he also tried to get away with some balderdash about the system telling me that my information didn't match its records because it was locking me out after too many attempts to log in. Which is not just balderdash, but Grade A Balderdash of the First Order, since the system told me it didn't know my SSN on my first attempt to access it. So just fucking apologize for wasting my time and have your people redesign the interface so that it works properly instead of blaming the customer when it doesn't work.

Okay, so I no longer feel bad about taking my money away from them.

Or, at least, trying to take my money elsewhere. Trying, it develops, is about the best I can hope for.

Next day I meet with my financial adviser, who has some, well, advice as to what I might do with my ELCA pension money. I decide on a course of action, and he starts me on the paperwork while he calls the Board of Pensions to get things started on their end. And we discover, after a little while, that it's not going to be as straightforward as we'd anticipated.

Big surprise.

Turns out ELCA policy says that one may withdraw no more than the greater of $10,000 or 10% of his or her account per annum. Except that there is a one-time allowance of $20,000 or 20%.

Which means that, if the market continues to perform as well or better than it currently is, it will be several years before I can get all of "my" money out!

Astonishing. And yet, somehow, not.

Of course, my adviser asked the Board of Pensions rep why this was so. And the answer: "It's policy." Afterward, I apologized for not prepping him on the fact that we would be dealing with a churchy organization, for whom "We've always done it that way" is considered a valid answer to any inquiry.

Actually, I understand the policy. National Public Radio runs a report on church organizations' pension funds being exempt from the protections of the Investment Company Act of 1940, the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, or state securities laws and the next thing you know people start to wonder if they're comfortable having their retirement loot in a fund that might simply go away at the whim of those running the fund. And the next thing you know, you have perhaps thousands of people withdrawing their money, all of it, right now. And the fund collapses.

I get that. But in my instance--my position was eliminated due to an extreme budget shortfall caused by mad Christians withholding giving because some other congregation somewhere else might call a gay pastor (see previous posts on that subject here and here)--you'd think that maybe there would be an exception. To be thrown under the wheels because of a bad reaction to ELCA policy and then told that I can't even take my little pension account someplace else because of some other policy smacks more than a little of adding insult to injury.

Or rather adding more injury to injury.

The insult part was blaming me for their crappy web system.

Another Good Way to Alienate Customers!

I have now spent nearly three hours over the course of two days attempting to access my pension account from my former employment. What a colossal waste of time--some of it my fault, but much of it the fault of an astonishingly badly designed system.

My quest began last week, when I contacted my financial advisor and asked him to be thinking of what I might do with the small amount I have in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America pension plan. From the moment I was informed that I was to be cast out of my nine-year position with the ELCA's South Dakota Synod, I knew that I would not keep my money in their pension fund for long. A report on National Public Radio the week before last, indicating that religious organizations are exempt from federal laws that protect workers' pensions, which can and does result in workers, as usual, getting the short end of the stick when their church-affiliated employer decides to terminate the plan, reminded me that I have a few pennies entrusted to a religious organization and that I might be better off getting them into a secular account quickly.

In preparation for my meeting with my financial guy, I had the brilliant idea of printing out my most recent account information, rather than rely on the latest quarterly report.

And the fun began.

I went online to log in to my Board of Pensions account. I haven't done this very often--maybe twice--so the first hurdle I encountered was not knowing my password. I set up the account so long ago that I didn't have it in my password database. I made a few likely guesses, to no avail. The website does of course provide a "forgot my password" link...but there's a catch: I not only needed my password, but also the e-mail address I used to set up the account!

Do you have any idea how many e-mail addresses I have?

Further, since my former employer used the e-mail system at Augustana College, and the college changed its e-mail format--and since the synod subsequently set up its own e-mail address scheme--I had no fewer than seven e-mail possibilities from the office alone! And the Board of Pension's website is not set up to deal with that possibility.

So I hit the "contact us" link, explained the issue, and waited for a reply.

I didn't have to wait long, so points for them, but the reply wasn't that helpful. It boiled down to speculating that if I hadn't accessed my account for an unspecified while (true that) the system might no longer remember me. The suggestion was to try entering as if I were a new user and set up a new account.

But in the meantime, I found a note on which I had recorded my password! No e-mail address, alas, but with the password I should be able to work out the e-mail address.

I made a list of likely addresses. Eleven of them.

The system liked the sixth one on my list. Of course, I had to re-enter my password twice with each attempt. But I'm lucky the system didn't lock me out after a couple-three shots.

Okay, so now I'm in. And here's a handy button I can click on to Access My Retirement Account. Perfect!

Yeah, well, "perfect" might be overstating it.

First I get the screen that tells me You are about to leave this site. This is almost never a good sign. The screen tells me also

To access your online retirement account you will be required to sign in at our record keeper, ACS HR Solutions.

To sign in, use the PIN you received in the mail. If you do not remember your PIN, please select Continue and use the Forgot Your PIN? feature in the login box. You will receive a PIN in the mail. Please remember your sign-in information for future visits.

Already I know that this will not end well.

But I bravely depress the friendly green Continue button anyhow. And down the rabbit hole I go!

The entrance page is straightforward enough: A bunch of small type about the retirement funds, including information that only inclines me to accelerate my departure:

Neither the ELCA Board of Pensions nor its funds are subject to registration, regulation or reporting under the Investment Company Act of 1940, the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 or state securities laws. Members, therefore, will not be afforded the protections of those provisions of those laws and related regulations.

Yikes! Okay what else? Ah, yes: Here's the log-in box. I need my Social Security Number, which I know, and, as promised, a PIN, which I don't. I don't dispute that at some point in the distant, foggy past the board mailed me a PIN. But I certainly don't remember it, and it seems a waste of time to go hunting for it when, I have been assured, there is a "Forgot Your PIN? feature in the login box."

And there is! So I click Forgot Your PIN?. And get a screen telling me that I need to enter my SSN first, and then click on Answer Challenge Question or Mail a PIN Reminder. Okay, that makes sense. I do so. And click Answer Challenge Question. This is looking promising.

Hahahahah! Foolish human! I am rewarded with a screen that says

The information you entered to log into the system does not match our records.

Which does not inspire much confidence. I like the idea that my pension fund remembers who I am. If nothing else, their records should include my Social Security Number, no? So at this point I realize that I was right to experience misgivings as soon as I was told that I'd be shuttled off to a third-party site, and that my initial instinct--viz., This will not end well--was accurate.

And then, to add insult, the screen that tells me they don't know who I am concludes with this advice:

Please Log In again now.

Uh-huh. You know, the only reason a person would be reading this message at all is that he or she could not log in in the first place, yes? So the suggestion is not only pointless but downright cruel.

And yet...

So I click the Log In link and have another go at it. This time I enter my SSN and click the Mail a PIN Reminder button. I mean, better than nothing, right? I'll get the PIN in a couple-three days, access my account, print out current numbers for my financial guy, and make an appointment with him to see what great ideas he has about putting the money in a safer place.

Except that the Mail a PIN Reminder button takes me right back to the "does not match our records" screen.

So what we have here, folks, is a "help" feature that is 100% unhelpful. It can't help you with a forgotten PIN, it can't issue you a "challenge question," it can't mail you a reminder, it can't do a blessed thing except waste your time, for it doesn't know who you are even when you give it your SSN repeatedly.

And we also have a certain growing misgiving about the management of the ELCA pension fund, if the "record keeper" doesn't seem to have a record of me.

Which, given what I know about religious organizations' exemption from pension-fund protection laws, makes me feel a little anxious.

Naturally the board's 800 number is answered only during business hours, so I'll have to wait another day to see about getting the information I need.

Oh, and I did dig through the filing cabinet and found all the information from when I signed up with the fund nearly a decade ago. No sign of any PIN, however. So we wait.

Now you may be inclined to say, "Hey, Ace, it's not the Board of Pension's fault you couldn't remember what e-mail address you signed up with all those years ago." And you will be entirely correct. You may be further inclined to say, "It's not ACS HR Solutions's fault that you can't find your PIN." And again you will encounter no argument from me.

But it is somebody's fault that the retirement-account system is badly organized and provides no help to customers who need it. I would say that that is a responsibility shared by ELCA Board of Pensions and ACS HR Solutions. And I would say that it's worse to promise online assistance that doesn't exist than to simply tell the user that he or she must call the 800 number during business hours to receive assistance.

As a lover of irony, however, I must chuckle at the fact that I entered this little exercise in futility as part of my intention to sever my connection with the ELCA Board of Pensions, so it's not like I can threaten to take my business elsewhere as a result of their goofy online account system.

Thinking Ahead!

A little while back, I started to fill out an entry for WinMoolah.com, yet another of these take-survey-win-prizes-though-probably-not sites. This is as far as I got, however:


Here's what brought me up short: In the Date of Birth portion of the registration, the options for Year included 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013.

That's right: They are signing up people who will be born in the future!


I'm all in favor of planning ahead, but no. I closed out at this point. But not before taking a snapshot of it for posterity.

Maybe "Accu" Refers to Something Else

This has been on the iMac for a couple of weeks now. It's a screen shot from AccuWeather.com, which indicated a temperature of 64 degrees. Not bad for November 3, in South Dakota...but not nearly as good as the 71 degrees indicated on the toolbar in the lower-right corner, which is provided by...um, well, AccuWeather.com. Whom do you trust? AccuWeather.com or AccuWeather.com? Or none of the above?

(At the moment, AccuWeather agrees with itself that it's 37 degrees.)

Keep it to Yourself!

What in the world would give DeepDiscount.com the idea that I upon visiting their web site, would want to be startled, by George Strait's voice suddenly and uninvitedly "welcoming" me and asking me to buy his new CD?

I have whined about this in the past, but apparently my wisdom has gone unheeded.

And it isn't just me. Ken Magill, writing in the latest issue of Direct magazine, hilariously details his experience with "one of the most ignorant e-mail campaigns in the short history of the medium":

It came in the form of spam from Bing energy drinks, pitching delivery service to offices in Denver.

It's bad enough that the receiving e-mail address is not used for commercial purposes — so the address was clearly harvested — and that Direct's offices are in New York.

Clicking on the unsubscribe button spawned a pop-up window that had audio.

A friggin' surprise talking pop-up window in my cubicle.

"Hey, this is Jeremy from the Dom and Jane morning show and I want to tell you about a product I've been using for a little while," said my computer out of the blue. "It's called Bing. It's a brand-new energy drink that's out there, and it's made from black bing cherries, hence the name."

Magill concludes:

Message to marketers: Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. If you want to make a sales pitch on my computer, especially the one at work, please shut up unless I indicate it's cool for you to talk.

I would extend that advice to webmasters as well.

Who Am I?

Okay, so I admit this is partly my fault, but I think these various websites need to take some responsibility too.

Here's the deal: A little while ago I decided to change some preferences in my Zap2It account. (Zap2It is the online TV listing I emigrated to when I got tired of waiting forever and a weekend for TV Guide's graphics to load. Now, of course, Zap2It has discovered Flash-animated advertising, so it takes forever and a weekend for the...ad...for...Glenn...Close's...new..series...to...load...before...the...listings...will...appear.) This meant logging in, naturally, and that's where the problem began. I put in one of my e-mail addresses and a likely password. And was rewarded with a screen that told me my "e-mail/password is invalid."

Well, yes. But which is it?

I have half a dozen e-mail addresses; in all likelihood I would have used one of my "big three" in signing up. I have more password out there than you can shake a stick at, and while I keep important ones stored (not on the computer, and not in a form that any would-be trespasser is apt to make sense of) there are half a dozen or so that I use for "non-vital" purposes like this one. It's been too long since I did permutations or factorials or whatever they may be to figure out how many possibilities we have here, but it's a bunch.

Of course, there's the "forget your password?" button...which means I have to keep plugging in e-mail addresses until I hit the magic combination. So I got it on the second try--that's not the point! The point is, wouldn't life be simpler if they would tell me which item, the address or the password, I got wrong? It would certainly cut down on the guesswork. And since some (indeed, many) sites seem capable of doing this, I don't suppose it's prohibitively difficult to effect.

And, yes, I could just write this stuff down. But I'm not always in the same location as my password list (seems like a bad idea to carry it around with me). And is it too much to ask that they meet me halfway?