New annual fee, without your asking!!

I got a new debit/ATM card in the mail from my new bank, Citizen's (signed up in September). The previous debit card shouldn't have been old enough to need replacing, so I looked it up. The old card was in the Greensense program which promotes online banking, e-statements, and other paperless initiatives. And has no annual fee. The card they sent me gives you a miniscule cash-back on purchases, but charges an annual fee.

The lady on the phone says "the system" did this on its own, so they waived the first year's fee. But I didn't ask for it. So she launches into the sales pitch. I repeat I didn't want it. A bunch of annoying security questions later (which were oddly enough not needed until I wanted to cancel a service) she is about to email me the enrollment form. Since you can only be in one program at a time, the system had to drop me from the first program to put me into the new one.

Really? You dropped me without my permission, and now I need to re-enroll? Alright, just put it on a plain ATM card with no programs.

The best part, though, was the security question. Which branch? I asked to clarify if she wanted the branch I opened the account with, or used most recently. She eventually understood my question, and said the one I opened it at. I said it was on Mass Ave in Dorchester around the corner from the Stop&Shop (which has a branch itself, which is why I mentioned that) but I didn't remember the address. She says that's not what "it shows". Since my computer is on, I pull up their location finder on their website. The stars on the map do not link to the list below the map, so you have no way of identifying which location is which. Eventually, I zoomed in close enough to see that the street the branch is ON was not labeled, but the next street over was Newharbor, so it must have been the Newbarbor location on the list. Luckily it was. So the branch inside the grocery store at the shopping center is listed as being on Mass Ave in Dorchester. The branch actually on the road instead of inside the shopping center, however, and yet a mere few yards away, was Newharbor Street, Boston. A perfect storm of unfriendly coincidence.

So, the new card should be arriving in an unreasonable amount of time. I have this sinking feeling that it was not be usable as a debit card, since I did make the specific mistake of asking for an ATM card. And all of this is because my old bank, which is pretty good, just has no locations in Boston, despite funding the athletic center (which has like 6 machines inside, so the huge list of local 'locations' really doesn't mean much) and calling themselves "America's most convenient bank." It's now about a 30 minute subway trip to get to a branch, because the one machine I did find that was reasonably not too distant doesn't take deposits. Convenient!

I was going to eventually phase out the inconvenient one for the one around the corner, but the one around the corner is starting to show some annoying tendencies.