What's wrong with the Dreamhost post? He specifically says: >"The end to this story is that of course, I’m very very sorry, we’re very very sorry, and I’m sure you’re very very sorry this happened. I really am. I understand the sort of problems that an unexpected large charge to your credit card (or worse yet, your debit card) can cause. If the tone of this blog post seemed a little light, I apologize I don’t mean to offend and I realize how serious an issue this is."

I can see why you'd still be annoyed about not getting your charges refunded though. What happened there? Frankly, if your bank didn't refund them when you told them what happened, they seem pretty scummy. I hope you dumped them as soon as you could!

The bank was SunTrust. They were very scummy.

As for what's wrong with the post, a ton. This was e-mailed to every single customer. For many people, myself included, this was their first notice that something was wrong with their finances. And it was the author's fault. The line you quoted was at the end of a very long post. The apology should have been right in the first paragraph. Instead in the first two lines he's complaining about how bad this is for him.

Then he makes a bunch of jokes. Then he explains why it was just tiny mistake. Don't feel bad if I missed the problem? I'm not the one being trusted with millions of dollars of your customer's money... [Edit: to me that bit reads as "See? You missed it too! Now why should I feel bad?"]

After all this, finally, he apologizes.

For me, this guy's mistake meant that I now had to worry about how I was going to pay bills/rent, and how I was going to eat. My situation was probably quite unique, but that didn't make it any less impactful for me.

To me the whole thing reads as "I just accidentally removed a few million dollars from my customers banks/credit lines - so now I'm gonna have a laugh with them!"

I can say with great confidence that I'm not immune to the mistakes that caused this to happen. But what I can say is that were I in his shoes, I'd lead with an apology, be very succinct about what happened, and finally list details as to how I'm going to make it better.

Edit: To his credit, if you read the next post he did a much, much better job there.

Edit 2: And also for what it's worth - I still use Dreamhost. Aside from this SNAFU they've ran an excellent service, and (again, except in this case) their customer service has been excellent in responding to any issues I've had. However now I always pay with credit rather than debit, and I don't store my card info.

Fair enough. It's probably a bad first contact on the issue. I read it as him fully accepting responsibility for the error and explaining exactly what had happened.

But then, it's easy enough for me to view it in a generous light, when it had no personal effect on me. I would no doubt have felt very different had it been my account that was wiped out!

Oh, and yeah banks suck, especially when you're poor. Been there...

That was a pretty terrible post. Very self centered. Just lots of me me/I's I's in the first few paragraphs I read. Pretty tone deaf to the real issue which would be customers like the above being impacted.

I was about to say this too. There was a lot of vitriol on the comments as well, but all of them follow the frustration of being overdrawn. But I agree, if the bank or card company doesn't take this as a genuine error and erase the record, then it's a pretty lousy institution.

Maybe he could have worded it differently and shown less irreverence, but that may be a byproduct of the stress as well. It's a pretty shocking thing too and they're human after all.

My current web host uses them as a registrar for some years and they've been pretty happy with DH services.

See my other comment for thoughts on the e-mail/post (sibling to yours).

On the banks... "Overdraft protection" is probably the single most disingenuous thing the banks have done to low-income individuals. It's such a "squeeze 'em when they're down" tactic. I had all kinds of financial problems in college, mostly my own doing, but they were sooo complicated by this... service. Suddenly because of one mistake, 10 small transactions turns into an additional $320 expense. Three days later you get 10 little envelopes in the mail. And then the dread. "Shit, I did it again. Now what am I gonna do?"

To the best of my knowledge, SunTrust wouldn't let you opt out prior to the CARD act. Or, if they did, none of their customer service reps or bank managers notified me of the possibility.

Thankfully I manage my finances better now. And thankfully the CARD act makes overdraft protection opt-in (although for a lot of banks this is just another clause in the phonebook-sized account agreement you sign), and there are now a few checking accounts (ING Direct, Ally bank) that treat payment of transactions that cause overdraft like what it is - a line of credit.

My local college credit union has an optional "Overdraft Protection Loan" service. You apply for an $X loan in the usual way (so bad credit, etc. can still hurt you here), but if/when you get it, they don't give you $X cash. Instead, they attach it to your checking account. If you go over, the bank automatically moves money from the loan to your checking account in $100 increments to cover the overdraft. There's no per-use fees, and as long as you pay it back within a month, there's no interest charged. (Or very little, I'm not clear--sometimes there's an extra 40 cents or so on there.)

It's really, really handy and they don't advertise it at all. I found out about it when I accidentally ran up a dozen overdraft fees and talked to an account manager about how to keep it from happening again. I'd recommend that everyone see if their bank offers something similar.

I'd say, as a general rule, don't put engineers into a PR role and expect it to go smoothly.

I think this very much depends on the empathy of the developers. We've a pretty strict rule that PR are not allowed to comment on technology; each time they have they've gotten it wrong and we end up looking "stupid". Now we have devs and PR work closely to get succinct and technically accurate updates out to our community.

This is, interestingly, a good reason to use a credit card (and pay it off in full every month) rather than a debit card. With a credit card, you at least have a layer of insulation between your bank account and an erroneous charge.

He who has the money has the power.

With a debit card, an erroneous charge means the other guy has the money, and you have no power.

With a credit card, you still have your money until you pay your bill, so up to that point, you still have the power.

Indeed. I have a much better system in place now.