November 14: Complaint letter sent to Citi Smith Barney.
December 9: Citi Smith Barney responds.
December 12: A different person at Citi Smith Barney responds again: “This is to acknowledge receipt of your November 14, 2008 correspondence… We are in the process of reviewing the situation and will report back to you as soon as we complete our investigation.”
December 15: A third letter from Citi Smith Barney: “Enclosed is [our] December 9, 2008 letter to you in response to your November 14, 2008 correspondence.”
In other words, “Oops, sorry, I didn’t realize that somebody else at the company had already spent time responding to your complaint, so I wasted my own time and the company’s money researching it again and sending you two more pointless letters about it!”
As I told them in my original complaint letter, “No wonder you guys are in such lousy financial shape, while Vanguard is doing fine. Vanguard knows how to serve its customers properly, whereas apparently all you know how to do is provide bad service and charge obscene fees.”
