I wrote before about the problem I was having with my lender regarding my bar loan. Despite 17 years of meticulously-maintained credit and all my private student loans being with them (for which they'd given me a very favorable rate), all of a sudden I'd ended up in this Kaska-esque vortex of unfavorable interest rates when I went to apply for my bar loan. This isn't a rational result, I said. This is policy, they said.
So what are you, I asked them, a company of robots? SOMEBODY is making this decision. I want to talk to them.
And eventually I did. I got as far up as a VP. It went back and forth for a while as they recognized the problem yet still clung to the policy, but I kept pushing. And eventually it turned out that they were not, in fact, a company of automotons: the human beings agreed that there was a problem with the policy and they fixed it.
I am now extremely happy, at least as happy as anyone could ever possibly be borrowing $12,000... Pushing the issue will have saved me a lot of money over the life of the loan, but more than that, it makes me feel good about my arguing ability. It wasn't beligerance that won the day; it was a combination of obstinance (which I was always good at) and logic (which I've honed in law school). And it worked.
I might make a good lawyer after all...