Dealing with estate issues requires patience.

Today, the bus driver was scheduled to appear in court to plead to his charges. I didn’t go to court; there was no point, his hearing was scheduled in front of a Justice of the Peace. In the late afternoon, I called to find out the results. Even with the docket number, there was much confusion. Eventually, after I had been on hold for almost fifteen minutes, the lady on the other end of the phone determined that the case had been further delayed until Wednesday. If I call back in 48 hours, they should be able to tell me what happened. Or maybe the case will be delayed further.

I finally received Ailish’s life insurance cheque, and deposited it today. That process required me to answer some rather invasive questioning from the bank clerk (“What did you sell to the City?”, “Was she a bicylist?”). The transaction also apparently required a bank manager and numerous telephone calls, as well as a detailed description concerning the hold placed on the newly deposited funds.

With that taken care of, I picked up supper from Tim Horton’s, only to have my debit card declined on a $9.51 transaction.

So, back to the bank. Now I have to explain to them how holds work on newly deposited funds. It turns out they had decided to place two holds on my chequing account, leaving my balance rather far in the red.

I’m not quite sure why everything must be so confusing, time-consuming, and difficult. I would have expected banks to regularly deal with cheques, or the court system to regularly deal with cases. But I really should not single out these two examples; pretty much every company I’ve dealt with in the past 145 days has been like this.