Is this normal? (Banks and Estate Agents)

Hi,

I am British (recently returned from New Zealand, since March this year), I am bringing my American fiancee over to the UK and we are on the last step needed before she applies for her fiancee visa in the US (we have been reading this site and it has been a great help).

We are now waiting on bank statements, and signing up for a flat.  What I am not sure of having been out of the country for so long is, is it normal to wait 8 days for a specially ordered statement that was promised in 7 days, are banks over here uniformally bad (I am with Lloyds TSB), also the Estate Agent we have dealt with after forking over the 35 pounds check our references fee (which has not happened to date) and the 200 pounds holding fee, has been on holiday for a week and we are looking at 2 weeks since viewing the flat and starting the referencing process and we still have nothing, so we are in waiting mode to start the visa process.

Just seems certain things in Britain are needlessly frustrating.

Thanks in advance for any advice or symapthy.

Dther

I'd  say that the banks  have certainly gotten slower and become increasingly frustrating to deal with in more recent  years.

So much of their operation has been centralized.  In some cases it's now impossible to phone your local branch to check or request anything -- You can reach only a "Customer Call Centre" a hundred miles away where nobody knows you.

LloydsTSb is hopeless, I used to work in their customer contact centre until they closed it down and for all we were there to help is seemed that we made more work as our system didn't work properly for certain functions.

I still refuse to talk to the contact centres, especially since they moved to India and data protection isn't all that great out there.  I tend to make a point to go down to the branch, I'd rather stand in a queue and wait.

I have to say, when I enquired about a joint bank account for me and my DF once we are married they were very off hand and refused to say if we could have one or not and I find that very frustrating.