Northern Rock

Account Closed
Northern Rock is unavailable

It is so irritating to read that Northern Rock ‘managers’ are now whining that the government should have done more, earlier, to prevent everyone from taking all their money out. The company’s own response to the problems has been unbelievably useless. On Friday, when I went to their site to see what they had to say about their situation, there was absolutely no mention of any problem at all. I found that very disconcerting so I cycled down to the Maddox Street branch to take my money out before it was too late. There was a queue, in part because only two out of the three counters were open. If there hadn’t been a queue I might have felt reassured, but since there was and since I’m English I obviously had to join it.
Once I’d closed my account I checked the Northern Rock site to see if online customers were having any luck logging in. I couldn’t even get the log-in page to open. It continued to be unavailable every time I checked, over the whole weekend. This must have been unbelievably frustrating for all those customers who had online-only accounts and couldn’t withdraw their money at a branch. By Saturday there was a very small link at the top of the home page leading to a mildly reassuring notice. By Sunday the link had got larger. On Monday they finally got around to replacing their front page with a big apology note. It they had done that on Friday, and if they’d thought to send all available staff to the counters, and if they’d properly managed their online account access then maybe there would have been no queues, no panic and no hours of frustration and stress for all their customers.
I am delighted that I’ve closed my account, it was only paying 4.8% and I would have closed it earlier if I’d noticed, but there must now be thousands of people who’ve got a whole load of money that was in a tax-free ISA and will now have to go into a tax paying account instead. They are victims of a combination of greed and incompetence on the part of the management of Northern Rock and those managers should now be committing Hara-Kiri, not whinging about how the government should have bailed them out sooner.

1 thought on “Northern Rock

Comments are closed.