Seachain an duine a bhíonn ina thost

I've just been to HSBC. I was going anyway, to ask them to upgrade my account to a normal student account (an email to the Assistant Registrar sorted out our student statement problem), but while I was there I thought I'd ask what I could do to improve my credit rating.

So we had a little look at my account. I mentioned that I'd had a cheque bounce, and the lady felt that wasn't enough to merit blacklisting.

Then she mentioned that I'd breached a "promise to pay" after my cheque bounced. "Ah," I said to myself. "That's what's wrong."

Now I have not breached any promise to pay. What has happened is that HSBC is staffed by idiots (except for the lovely lady who helped me to sort all this out).

You see, my cheque bounced on April 20th 2006. On April 22nd I got a phone call (they may have phoned earlier, but I only arrived back on April 22nd) asking when I would sort this out. I told the Indian guy on the phone (who was really struggling to understand me) that I would lodge the bank draft I'd brought with me on the Monday (April 24th) and that it should clear by Thursday (April 27th). So he entered into his little computer that I had made a "promise to pay" on April 27th.

So on the 24th I pottered along to the bank and lodged my bank draft. But HSBC's magical computer didn't care about this. It simply looked at my account on April 27th and saw that I hadn't lodged any money that day, and decided that I had breached my promise to pay.

In a nutshell, I have a black mark on my record for paying money into my account early.

Anyway, she's going to set in motion a sort of complaints procedure thing, so somebody somewhere will go listen to my phonecall and hear that I said I would lodge my money on the Monday, and if I'm right (which I am) they'll amend my financial records and tell Equifax to amend theirs too.

By that time I should also have my shiny new account with a credit card and overdraft, so my credit rating may well have risen enough to get a phone. And perhaps I could persuade O2 to ask Equifax to reinstate the point they took off my credit rating for refusing me credit, something which was clearly based on HSBC's mistake. Perhaps pigs will fly.