you can't make this stuff up....

Situations like the subject of today's post are the reason my blog has the name that it does: because there are so many situations with life overseas that the only response is to shrug one's shoulders. Ok. It's not the only response. But it's preferable to bursting forth with a tirade of anger.

There's so much back story here. You need to know that even simple banking transactions in China take multiple receipts, stamps, signatures, and paperwork. Nothing is "simple." It's even more difficult operating as a business than as an individual. It's even more complicated when you're a foreign-owned business.

Essentially, we had to use Bank of China to open our business account. There is exactly one branch, exactly one window that we can go in-person to use. If the someone who works that window is out, on break, on vacation...sorry. Come back another day.

BUT.....They have online banking! That doesn't mean you can actually just log on to the bank's website and make a transaction. In order to access your online banking account you have to first insert a USB fob security protection thingy. After that, to actually complete any transaction, both parties on the account have to enter their username and password correctly. In a larger company this would be like the CEO and the CFO, in our case it's me and James. In theory it's a great checks and balances system: one party enters who should be paid what and the second party approves it. IN THEORY.

Here's the thing: this fob thingy is clearly ONLY designed to be used with Chinese computers with Chinese operating systems, even though we are a foreign owned company.

Our first problem was that the majority of the time we plugged in the USB, it would un-install our Chinese keyboard rendering us unable to type Chinese. We operate in China, so every payee has a name that we need to type Chinese characters for! This device makes typing in Chinese impossible. After trying a failed series of actual fixes for this problem, we just outsmarted it! We would send ourselves wechat messages with all the Chinese words we needed to type, open up the web version of wechat, have two tabs open and cut the words from wechat and paste them into the online banking window.

Judds-1
Chinese online banking-0

Lest you think this problem is limited to us, it's not. Our friends in our city who also have a business have one and only device that they can even get the fob to register in and it's some old laptop that's like 12 years old. They use it for nothing other than this one task of online banking.

But the problem was becoming exacerbated. Instead of just disabling our Chinese keyboard, which it began doing more frequently, it's now just messing with the keyboard in general. This means that even if a type a letter "c," it may or may not register that I'm typing a "c." This becomes a HUGE problem when one must confirm not one, but TWO user names and passwords in order to do a single transaction. AND, one also only has three tries to type the password correctly before you are completely locked out of your account.

Let me break it down this way: To access our account we have to use a device that messes up our keyboard, but we still need the keyboard to enter the correct passwords. It makes our computer unable to type Chinese and then requires us to type Chinese to actually make any payments.

Remember how I said there's only one bank and only one window? And guess what? Because James and I are BOTH on the account we BOTH have to go to this one window and wait in line and fill out papers, and bring our passports, and company registration paperwork, and company chops (stamps) to reset the online. And if we both have to go we either have to do all this with three small ones at our feet or find a babysitter.

We are currently in our third lockout. THIRD LOCKOUT! At least the first two happened when we were a few miles from the bank. This time it's when we're in America and our bank, and our hope of reset, is on the other side of the world.

Judds- (maybe)1
Chinese online banking- 3

These are the aspects of life overseas that we've just gotta shrug our shoulders and go on, because there is literally nothing we can do until we're back on that side of the world. Our business money is just stuck there and we're here.

But, I'll also add that this is the same account and same money that it took us exactly three months to the day to get access to when we were first registering the business. We started transferring the money for the initial business investment on Jan 10 and it was completed on April 10. The name and investment amount on the wire transfer had to exactly match the name and investment amount on our registration documents. On our registration paperwork, James and I invested equal amounts separately. X amount from him and X amount from me. However, all this money was coming from the same place, our joint account in the States. It HAS to come from the States to verify that it's a foreign invested company. But because it's a joint account, James name keeps showing up on both wires, truncating my name since it's the second name listed on our joint account.

We stayed up late at night multiple nights calling our US bank to talk through options about how to make my name show up. We paid additional wire fees for the banks to send each other "messages" to try to make it all line out correctly. The Chinese bank had all the investment capital but couldn't give us access to the money or finalize the opening of our account until the names matched.

We looked at options for me opening an additional, separate account so that my name would be the only one listed. (No one lets you do that from the other side of the world) Finally, we remembered an old savings account I had before we were married. Score! More late nights calling their customer service to change it to my married name. That was easy. After we got access to that account, we planned to move the money there, then transfer it to China. Guess what? That bank can't do international transfers!

New plan. We'll use one of our other accounts to transfer it. (Our main bank is a local bank in OK has to use a bigger bank to send the wire transfers and the messages and some things are getting lost in that first transfer, so we're trying to cut out middlemen).

More late nights on the phone with that bank's customer service who tell us they won't send international wire transfers to China because there's been an uptick in fraud. James patiently asks for manager after manager until they finally agree to do it if he can answer a series of security questions.

If you think that seems like an easy task, you have never been an expat. Where were we living when the account was opened? Which stateside information did we give them? my parents? James parents? Our old house we still owned after we moved to China but sold recently? cell phone number? whose? at which point in history? But this particular set of "escalated" security questions will go back 15 years and pull questions from our credit history. Although it is day time for the US bank, it's the middle of the night for us, and we are living in three-small-children-induced-sleep-deprived-inability-to-remember-what-we-ate-for-breakfast-land, and now the registration of our business depends on our ability to recall specific numeric data from any point in the past 15 years.

GREAT. In this case, seriously. Great job, James. He was able to pull out his cousin's full birth date (who was also a college roommate) and I think we had to know the names of all the counties we had lived in. or not lived in. I can't remember now. And a few more questions. Anyway, somehow we were able to convince them to let us send our own money to our own selves.

If you've read this far, the moral is this: the Judds can't win. If we're in China, our money is stuck in the US wire transfers or fraud protection purgatory. If we're in the US, our money is stuck in China's USB-keyboard malfunction hell.

Next time I'll write about how every time we've broken a cell phone, it's been a Chinese phone breaking in America when the needed parts are in China, or breaking an American cell phone in China, when the needed parts are in America.