Merrill Lynch, slackers

While getting my 401k out of Merrill Lynch and moving it to its current roost was in some ways 100 times easier than getting Mary's 403b out of TIAA-CREF: we got it done in one conference call rather than months of hand-wringing bullshit. But then, after moving so swiftly to extract the ducats, I'm informed that Merrill can send them to the recipient either by 1st Class mail (7-10 business days) or by UPS (4 days), and the latter is excluded because the new home uses a PO Box. So all my money is dangling in the USPS zone for 7-10 days, and a lot of them have been good market days.

Now, as market news geeks know, some significant portion of one's lifetime gains can come from being in the market when things turn. This underlies the buy and hold and dollar-cost averaging theologies. So imagine my dismay at having this non-pathetic bucket of cash out being shuffled between mail bins somewhere between here and its destination in the MidWest.

Merrill Lynch is a classic "wirehouse," in industry terms, whatever the fuck that means. Why don't they wire my money?