On Lindy's hilarious post this morning about overdrafts, a commenter told her that she is an irresponsible baby who does not know how to manage her money and that she should thank the bank for being gracious enough to take her money. And then commenter Ben responded with the most amazing comment I have seen in many weeks, which I am going to re-run here in its entirety (bolds are mine), because everyone who has a bank account at one of the big banks should read it:

Look, the banks intentionally do everything in their power to screw you out of money. That's not hyperbole. They really do everything they can get away with to take your money without having to actually do anything.

They run debits before credits to make it harder to keep ahead of things. They run charges largest-to-smallest, to maximize the number of charges after you go into the negative. They do these things this way specifically to take your money. They make all the rules, and, in aggregate, they've been playing the game about a hundred thousand times as long as you have. Their only motivation is to take as much money from you as possible, as efficiently as possible, hopefully while blaming you for it.

Now, before you go all read-the-fine-print douchenozzle on me: YES. They are well within their legal rights to do whatever they can to try to screw everyone else out of all of their money without actually doing any work. Similarly, Lindy is well within her legal rights to say that they are fucking inhuman shitpiles for doing so.

And of course, you are well within your legal rights to say that she should just have a computer brain that can instantly cross-reference every event that occurs in her life with every word that has ever passed in front of her eyes, all while running a perfect tally of all her financial assets and obligations, updated in real-time, allowing for any sort of emergency situation with some kind of percentage safety margin as determined by an elaborate collection of actuarial data.

And I am perfectly within my legal rights to recurse down to this level, and call you a fucking asshole. You fucking asshole.

Thank you, Ben. You are awesome.

And I'd just like to say to everyone: Join a credit union. Seriously. I can't imagine the kind of broke-ass hell I'd be living in right now if Glenn Beck (allegedly) stole my old U.S. Bank debit card number instead of my credit union-linked credit card. My credit union made the whole awful situation relatively painless, and they provided friendly service the whole time. U.S. Bank would have milked my (possibly Glenn Beck-related) misfortune for every red cent.