Hello, Bank? This is Customer.

Dear Banking Institution - aka THIEVES:

I am highly displeased with your money management skills; specifically your management of MY money. It seems to be your policy to charge me money for not having money in the bank when a check goes through, thus leaving me with LESS money. Then you charge me for having less money and so on and so on. How can you justify that? The money isn't going to magically appear in the account - trust me, I've tried that trick myself. It doesn't work.

I wonder if any of you in the INSTITUTION have ever run into serious financial crunches. You musn't have or you would have some small sense that, hmmmm....this happens to people who don't have ungodly amounts of money rolling in. Things happen in people's lives when there are unexpected expenses, or when you have to wait a year to get the check back from the insurance for your child's medical bills, or when your child support check doesn't arrive on time, or when payday falls differently than it usually does, or when you switch jobs and you go a month without a paycheck.

Everyday the mail carrier brings me those white envelopes with Time Sensitive Material posted on the outside. Like I even need to open those. They all say the same thing, "YOU are BROKE. You have NO money. And your reward for not having any money is that we're going to charge you MORE money that you don't have and make it harder for you to catch up."

Oh, and to all of you credit card companies - well, I shake my fist at you! You do the same thing only with a different spin. You lower the limit that I'm not over yet because I missed one little payment. Now that you've lowered the limit, I'm over the limit. Guess what....I now have a new charge for being OVER the LIMIT that I wasn't over in the first place. Now that new charge throws me deeper into their little web of money. You people at the credit cards must be disgustingly wealthy after all of the money you've milked out of us poor saps. Explain to me, though, why it is that if someone gets sucked too far into this trap and has to file bankruptcy to get out, that he or she is then considered a risk and a bad person? WHAT ABOUT THE CREDIT CARD COMPANIES AND BANKS? Do they receive any form of punishment for robbing us blind? Isn't fraud illegal? Oh, that's right, they have all of that small print that none of us bothers to read. It's wrong. Just wrong.

In closing, dear lenders, I would like to say that I consider you all slime. I hope that someday you worry about your bills and if your paycheck is even going to bring your bank balance UP to $0.00. No, I don't wish that on you. That is a horrible place to be. Trust me. Thankfully things are working the right way for a while and our horizon is looking a bit brighter, but I still think you're all scum.

Most Sincerely Yours,

MG