You Are Not In Control

One of the things you have to get used to as an American in Spain is the fact that you are not in complete control of your own bank account. The practice of writing a check and mailing it to a company to pay your bills just does not exist in Spain. They also won’t let you go online and pay after you receive a bill in the mail. What you have to do to pay, let's say your telephone bill, is give the telephone company your bank account number so they can suck the money right out of your account whenever they want to. Then they just tell you what they took - nice guys! If they take too much money because they screwed up, you get the pleasure of trying to fix the problem after the fact!

This is unsettling to Americans. Virtually the only entity that can do that to you in the US is the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) - for income taxes, and if they do that it’s because you haven’t been paying taxes for years. In Spain it seems they don’t trust people to actually pay their bills themselves so they have this foolproof method instead.

So, every month (or so) I look online to see what they took from me. Usually it’s ok but currently I can’t stop Telefonica from taking money for a dial-up connection I canceled, or for a DSL line I never received.

The latest fun came from Gasnatural. I normally use very little gas. My consumption might be 12 cubic meters per month or 14 Euros. So, imagine my surprise to see I used 2000 meters one month! The company didn’t seem to think this was unusual so they just started to suck Euros out of my bank account – 168, 185, 153 Euros on three consecutive months.

All this makes me very leery about signing up for any more domiciliacion bancaria. It also makes me feel more like a pawn than a customer. In the US, at least you can say, “Screw you I’m not paying!” But in Spain it seems like “The Man” is doing all the screwing.