The final item in the Comcast saga is that I overpaid them by $5.42 and they issued me a check for it, which of course they directed to my old address so it took a while to arrive. But at least dealing with them is over for now. Thank you, neighbor with open wireless.

Yesterday I took the check to the bank, along with another one, to deposit them. Usually I make deposits in my credit union account, but these were low-denomination checks so I decided to deposit them through Bank of America. This is the first time I’ve used one of their new ATMs that can scan your checks, determine their amount, and issue you a receipt with the check image on it. It’s pretty cool. You don’t need a deposit slip or envelope and you don’t even have to enter the amount if the check can be OCRed properly. One of my checks was, but the Comcast one wasn’t. It showed an image (zoomable!) anyway so I was easily able to enter the amount based on the image, even though the check was no longer in my hand. The receipt printed both checks with small but recognizable images (this is optional if you don’t want it, but I thought it was cool).

Big businesses can be annoying to work with, and Bank of America demonstrated this recently when I wanted to change my address. They offer the ability to do that online — sensibly enough, since you can do pretty much everything else with your account online — so after I moved, I did. However, for some reason that I still don’t understand, they refused to complete the online address change, claiming that I had changed my address too recently. That’s utter nonsense, since I lived in the same place for three years and only updated my address once to correct the spelling (yes, I spelled my own address wrong — the street name has two variants that are both common and I chose the wrong one).

It took quite a bit of back-and-forth to correct this, including a visit to the branch where they informed me that since it’s a California account, they can’t change it on the Oregon computer system (WTF? Really?) and it only ended when I described my address change history (or rather, lack thereof) in detail and threatened to move on if they continued to be clueless. Finally I got someone responding to my emails that seemed to realize there was no actual problem, so she changed it for me.

But they do have cool tech.