We have a bank account with the Bank That Owns Everything. An added wrinkle is that this account was opened in Texas. When we moved here, we were told that California is Special, and we’d need to close the Texas account and open a new one in this state if we wanted to use the ATM to make deposits — except that we’d lose the long-time customer privileges that we had with the current account. The only other hitch to keeping the Texas account is that any time we need to make a change with the account, we are transferred a zillion times from representative to representative until we are connected with the appropriate person in Texas.<\/p>\n
I called the Bank ahead of time to ask what I needed to do to change my name on the account from Kathryn Petro-Harper<\/em> to Kathryn P. Harper<\/em> and was told a visit to a branch bank with an I.D. would be enough. So I went in and said, “I want the account to reflect my name as it is legally on my Social Security card and driver’s license. I want to drop the hyphen and use an initial instead of my full middle name.” I was told I had to come back with a copy of my marriage license. I said the marriage license was irrelevant and actually showed me listed by my maiden name, and iterated that I had several forms of identification that sufficed, and that I’d been told by their staff this would be enough. The Customer Service Drone repeatedly said, “You need to bring the marriage certificate. These aren’t legal documents.”<\/p>\n So I had to turn into the customer I dislike: the one who won’t go away, take a lame excuse for an answer, who requests to speak to a manager because she smells bullshit and doesn’t want to get any on her. I said I had arranged for a babysitter and that I was not leaving until my request was fulfilled. I didn’t get rude, but the situation became a little tense.<\/p>\n I walked out having negotiated the following (through the California Customer Service Person who spoke with a Texas Customer Service Person and wouldn’t let me speak with him directly): they would drop the hyphen but said they had to keep Petro on the account legally, though I could have our checks reprinted using the initial. Never mind the fact that when I was put on the account in 2004, I was unmarried and signed on the account as Kathryn M. Petro using my driver’s license as proof of identification.<\/em> In 2005, they did need a copy of the marriage license to drop the M. and make it Petro-Harper (as did Social Security and CA DMV but once those records are amended this should be enough). So what changed in two years? (Please don’t attempt to answer that.)<\/p>\n Anyhow, I now need to do this or something like it with all my financial accounts, medical records, library cards, online shopping accounts, the IRS, our will and trust, friends, family, etc. (I’m fortunate that family and friends won’t require identification before accepting this news.) So I called Husband and told him we were never going to divorce, because this is the second time I’ve gone through the process and never will again. He laughed. Oh, foolish me, that I didn’t foresee this change of heart and mind once I became a mother!<\/p>\n So again, to reiterate: I am no longer using Petro-Harper as my surname. Now it is, simply, Harper. A fine name it is!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We have a bank account with the Bank That Owns Everything. An added wrinkle is that this account was opened in Texas. When we moved here, we were told that California is Special, and we’d need to close the Texas account and open a new one in this state if we wanted to use the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,34,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor","category-motherhood","category-social-science"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2201"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4528,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2201\/revisions\/4528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}