Your account is only worth the last four months, and don't expect us to contact you we have six million clients.

One of my businesses is a cc that does business with contractors who buy large amounts occasionally.

Imagine my surprise when I looked on my internet profile and saw that my cc account had GONE!!

OK I know the last time I deposited anything was end November, but December and January are lost months in the contracting industry and everybody knows there is a 'recession' and that the 'political musical chairs' playing out provincially and locally means that contracts that should have been awarded in December before 'shutdown' still haven't been awarded so it was my fault, I was remiss, I never deposited the non existant deposits.

So I tootled down to my local branch of 'effen B' to get them to re-instate it.

Bongani "Your Account is closed"

Me "What was that you said?"

Bongani "It is closed and I can't open it again, you must open a new account"

Me "But what about the people that know my account number, I must tell everybody a new number? get authority to reopen it!!"

Bongani "Sorry but the section that deals with it hasn't the authority to re-open it"

Me "Well then go over their heads to someone higher up!!"

Gets Grant? on the line.

Grant 'Well you see, we have six million accounts and we can't contact everybody before the system closes the account and dumps your FICA details after four months of in-activity, it costs seven thousand rand to re-open an account you know, but I will re-instate it this once, if you let it go stale again, that's it, but you have to pay us the R50.oo that we wrote off and do 'FICA' again"

Hours later 11h30 to 15h40 with a trip home to get my FICA documents, I have my account again, what a rigmarole wasted half a day to reopen an account that existed last month!

If the system can close an account, surely it can suspend it for a few months before they close it and dump the FICA details so it is a simple code to re-instate it and not cost money?