I actually thought my blog looked pretty cool with the whole no-posts thing going on, but I actually have a story you might find useful, so hey...

The other day I received an e-mail from my grammy telling me that my Fifth Third bank account was $80 overdrawn. I checked online and saw that the last transaction caused me to overdraw by two dollars (due to the ATM fee). Two days later my balance was at negative $80 thanks to overdraft fees.

Naturally, I wasn't happy. This has happened a number of times before — the ATM gives me money and the receipt still says I have a positive balance. I started looking around on the Fifth Third site to see what I could do to prevent this kind of thing. They advertise a few kinds of Overdraft Protection, but they're all scams which require you to sign up for another type of account with them — overdrawn funds will just be withdrawn from your other account.

So I called their Customer Service number and simply asked, "Is there any way to make ATMs not give me money when they shouldn't, and instead just tell me I have INSUFFICIENT FUNDS?" After lecturing me about how it is my own responsibility to keep track of my account balance (What?! This is America! I'm not responsible for anything!), the woman told me (rudely) that I could go to my local branch and tell them to "remove The Matrix from my account." After hearing and processing this for a moment, all I could say was, "...and that's all I have to do?" She said, "That's all." This was certainly news to me. I also found out that this cushion allowance is not entirely controlled by the bank — whether or not it will let you overdraw, and by how much, is ATM-dependent.

I was planning on walking up to the bank anyway to deposit a check that would bring me to a positive balance, so I decided it wouldn't hurt to try. I wasn't sure I could ask the teller anything about "The Matrix" while keeping a straight face, so first I mentioned my above experience to various people to see if this was common knowledge. None of them had heard of this "matrix" before, so they all just laughed, and said the banker was probably just trying to make me look stupid, which I also suspected. Ian suggested asking the teller "If I do this, will I not be able to enjoy steak anymore?"

I also searched the web for anything related to bank accounts and matrices. The term is not hard to find on banking sites, but it never appeared in this context. Even searching the Fifth Third site for just "matrix" returned nothing. It seemed to make more sense for my account to be part of a matrix, instead of the other way around — so should I ask to "remove my account from The Matrix" instead? I at least decided that it would be more intelligent and less embarassing to refer to it as "The Overdraft Matrix."

I walked to the bank and after depositing my check, I smoothly asked the teller "if it would be possible to remove The Overdraft Matrix from my account." I expected her to just look at me weird or laugh, but she just said "Okay!" and typed some stuff on her computer. I was a little stunned by her terse response and asked "...so am I all set?" Apparently doing this was no big deal, and she just said "Yep!"

I also asked if there were any other side effects to doing this besides the ATM thing, and she just said that, logically, my checks could actually bounce now instead of being accepted even when I'm overdrawn. I've only ever written a single check in my life (I'll let you figure that one out) so I wasn't too worried about that.

Patty told me that her bank account works the smart way by default, and she's never overdrawn. Everyone else I've talked to says that ATMs will indeed allow them to overdraw, causing large fees to build up. So I encourage everyone to follow my lead — down with The Matrix!